Best memories from 2006

The wonderful rides in the BMTC buses. 1, 2, 3, 4

Another one

She said : "I bought another pair of shoes yesterday. Clogs."

He said : "I bought another USB drive. 2GB. What do you with all these shoes, anyway?"

She said : "I give each pair a weight and then decide which pair to wear such that the distribution of weights for each month is a Gaussian with mean 2.5 and variance that is 3.75 times the rate at which my cells multiplied over the previous month. What do you do with all your USB drives?"

He said : "I try and use a worst-fit policy to store files such that I don't have to delete anything for as long as possible."

She said : "Dude, that's just pathetic. You couldn't even come up with a pseudo-random process? And everybody just assumes that you're the eccentric scientist and I'm Jessica Simpson. It's all about your 'Little Einstein' look, isn't it?"

He said : "What did you expect? Image, my friend, is everything."

Imagined

She said : "So, how do I look?"

He said : "Umm, why are there little mirrors all over your clothes? Warding off the evil eye or something? If you bend a little bit, I might be able to use you as a periscope."

She said : "Why do you wear grey T-shirts every single day? Some sort of deep philosophical point about how nuanced and complex the world is, a protest against the unpredictability of modern fashion, or just an unfortunate by-product of the color-blindness thing?"

He said : "Hey, there's nothing wrong with my clothes, ok. I have good taste."

She said : "So says the man who listens to 'It's only words' 25 times a day."

What I like about you.

You're one of the kindest and most gentle people I know. You've never been anything but incredibly nice to me no matter how upset, ill or afraid you were. When other people thought of me as a problem kid, I think you could see me for who I was, a deeply flawed person trying really hard to do all the right things.


You are the kind of person I would like to be: often uncomprehending but never disinterested, often out of place among people but never out of touch with them. No matter how grown-up you try to be when you're advising people, there is always a child-like innocence in everything that you say.


Grandma, I think you and I are kindred souls, simple people doing our best to understand a cynical world.

Yet another one

She said (while watching the Lakers-Heat game) : "Who's Kobe Bryant?"

He said : "The answer involves 3 NBA championships, a scoring title, an 81 point game, a rape case, a $4 million diamond ring, the answer to the question 'Who's Shaquille O'Neal', and possibly a discussion of the triangle offense. While all that is immensely fascinating, the entire 4th quarter of the game will elapse before I answer your question. So, please don't ask."

She said : "Don't talk like that to me, I'm not my usual happy self today."

He said : "Heh heh heh. Oh! I mean, oh my god, are you feeling ok?"

She said : "How am I going to hurt you? Let me count the ways."

Another imaginary conversation

She said : "I'm leaving for Chicago today for the break."

He said : "That's amazing, my friend XYZ is also going to Chicago today."

She said : "It's not just amazing, it's absolutely incredible. Two different people going to Chicago on the same day, what are the odds of that happening? I mean, that's like Jayasuriya hitting a six, I don't think it has even ever happened before."

He said : "You know, I'm going to win one of these exchanges one day. You just wait and watch."

She said : "Sure."


PS: Is it possible that laziness and lethargy are just symptoms of some rare medical disease? Chemical imbalances in the brain, neurological disorders, hormonal deficiency, something in that vein.

Bilingual knock-knock joke

Knock knock

Who's there?

Suma.

Suma who?

Summa vaaye moodindu kadava thorey daa (Tamil for 'Just shut up and open the door')

An imaginary conversation

He said : "So what do you do?"

She said : "I'm a yeast geneticist"

He said : "You study the genes of yeast? Why?? What's the point? Oh, wait! Does yeast really have genes, or did you just make stuff up to get funding?"

She said : "You know, you shouldn't be talking about making stuff up. In your candidacy exam, you claimed that your radiometer calibration would end world hunger, fix global warming and cure cancer and AIDS as well. At least my work offers humanity the promise of better beer, what does your work offer? "


He said : "Err.... Umm.... Ahem! You see, well calibrated radiometers can give us data that could possibly be used for......"

She said (interrupting) : "Knock knock"

He said : "Who's there?"

She said : "Rhea."

He said : "Rhea who?"

She said : "R(h)eally, you should just shut up"




PS: Any resemblance to real conversations with real yeast geneticists is purely coincidental and completely unintentional.

About me

I don't just do things.


I want to do them. Then I really want to do them. Then I absolutely have to do them. Then I'm afraid that it's too late to do them. And finally, when I'm past caring, I do them.

A while back, I wanted to fill air in my car tires. Then I spent a couple of weeks really wanting to fill air in my tires. Then, for a few days, I absolutely had to fill air in my tires. For a couple of days after that, I was afraid that my tire tubes would just give out. When I finally filled air, the tire pressure was about half of what it's supposed to be.


I now want to write a paper about an idea that I have..........

Ultimate Foo - Part 2

She was there when he went again.

Can I still get that petrol card? These autowallahs make so much money, I'm buying an auto myself.

She handed the form without a word.

He completed the form, saw the firm look on her face, and left quietly.

At least, I can put this on the blog.

Update:


Seeing him slink away, she smiled.

Many men hit on her, from rich kids to balding businessmen. They all acted like she was some whore, available for anybody with money to pickup.He was different, he treated her with respect.




She felt safe, almost happy, as she realized that she wouldn't trust anybody any more.

Ultimate Foo

He stepped out of the ATM:

Sir, 2% discount on petrol with this card....

I don't even have a car.

Bike?

Nope.

You will buy one soon?

No.

With a tired nod, she stepped aside.




He noticed her packing her stuff and walked back.

I see you're leaving. Ummm, can I buy you some coffee?

Update:


She didn't look poor, but had sounded like she really needed the money from her job.

She was used to people ignoring her, or rudely brushing her off. But it seemed to have broken her will when he had been polite, almost nice, but still refused the card.

No you can’t, but thanks for asking.

Meeting et. al.

- Minutes of today's meeting:

1. Pleasantries
2. Realised that we have 2 weeks to get things done
3. Decided to meet next week
4. Declared meeting closed.


- First law of joke-telling: If you think your joke is absolutely hilarious, don't tell it. Nobody else is going to get it.

Do you know what the term 'big time bulb-acks' means? I definitely do.


- I have concluded from rigorous experimental verification that really bad things happen whenever I ask women out. But this post by ideasmith almost makes me want to try again.

If you can't beat them ('love-ly posts' I mean), link to them.

- Sledging a batsman when he's batting, that's gamesmanship. Flipping a guy off after he's out, I think that's just a sign of mental weakness.

Samantha

- I think (American) football is not a very intuitive sport to learn. It took me a while to realize that offensive and defensive linemen don't really dislike each other and only fight to get into appropriate position.


- You know how tennis fans talk about the best player never to have won a Grand slam? Would any of the following be a comparable category for Indian blogs:

a. Best blog not to appear on the India Uncut sidebar.
b. Best blog never to have been linked by Desipundit.
c. Best blog never to have had instant-money-making schemes peddled in its comment space.


- Man, I really wish A.I. had gone to Minnesota.


- Duncan Fletcher: Dead man walking.


- Isn't it wonderful when ad agencies get so excited about their Christmas ads that they start playing them from the first week of November?


- You didn't really expect the title to make sense, did you?

An update

Remember the excellent research idea that I pitched here, that nobody was interested in? As a temporary, and perhaps inelegant, solution to the problem I bought myself this:

Aha!

Your online enrollment form doesn't work. Your toll-free customer service number has been engaged all the 7 times that I tried calling it. I think I understand why you're giving me such a good deal.

Flowers

This series of posts by n reminds me of this old (and possibly imaginary [1]) conversation that I had with a friend:

Friend: "How can you be so cold-hearted? It's like when you look at a flower you don't even see anything beautiful."

Me: "I think it has to something to do with the distribution of neurons between the right and left side of the brain. I think my parents left a really big electric heater near my crib when I was a baby, and I think its radiation skewed the neuron distribution in my brain."


[1] The first part of the conversation is definitely real, but I can't remember if I came up with the response immediately, or if I thought of it two days later in the shower.

That happens to me sometimes.

Question

If you're an anonymous female blogger, I have the following long-winded question about the people who hit on you through your blog [1] :

They don't know who you are and what you look like. They don't know if you look petite or athletic or like a gymnast or like Karnam Malleshwari's training partner. They don't know what kind of clothes you wear, the places you hang out at, how you drink your coffee. They don't know if you're married with two kids, if you have a boyfriend, if you're single.

All they know of you, they get from the bits and pieces of your life that you blog about. And yet they send you insistent and familiar emails, trying to make a connection.

But I ask you, anonymous female blogger, isn't this behavior admirable in a way? Isn't it a little noble to be attracted to a bunch of thoughts and ideas instead of needing a whole person to have a crush on?

[1] The kind that you issue severe warnings to in the 'About me' section of your blog.

Stuff.

- Random coffee shop guy: "Sorry I'm mangling your name like this."
Me: "Don't worry, it's a mutual thing. Where I come from, George is a tongue-twister that kids get to spell in the spelling bee."

- My greatest wish in life is to get married to a girl who likes watching ESPN more than other channels. Too many women I know don't realize that you can't just switch channels when there's a sporting event going on. Unfortunately, the only such women I know are either members of my family or, in M's case, married. [1]


- Regarding weight loss, it really bothers me when people look at that height versus optimum weight chart and decide to go on a diet because they're exactly 7 pounds overweight.


[1] I'm hoping here that married life hasn't done funny things to M and she's suddenly not morphed into an Ekta Kapoor watcher.

Deepest book ever written

- As part of the new lifestyle choice that I talked about here, I started reading Zarathustra. I think the book is incredibly hilarious as long as you don't try to understand it. For example:

My brother, are war and battle evil? Necessary, however, is the evil; necessary are the envy and the distrust and the back-biting among the virtues.

Lo! how each of thy virtues is covetous of the highest place; it wanteth thy whole spirit to be ITS herald, it wanteth thy whole power, in wrath, hatred, and love.

Jealous is every virtue of the others, and a dreadful thing is jealousy.
Even virtues may succumb by jealousy.

He whom the flame of jealousy encompasseth, turneth at last, like the scorpion, the poisoned sting against himself.

Ah! my brother, hast thou never seen a virtue backbite and stab itself?

Man is something that hath to be surpassed: and therefore shalt thou love thy virtues,--for thou wilt succumb by them.--

Thus spake Zarathustra.

I was ROFLing when I read this stuff even if I didn't have a clue about what it meant.

That said, I think this intellectual pretender idea isn't as good as it originally seemed.



- The most perversely unproductive human activity that I can think of is the act of making a bed. What possible good can come out of tucking your bed sheet into the bed and folding your blanket into neat little rectangles everyday?

And don't even get me started about ironing clothes. I think the human race has an almost pathological fondness for symmetry.



- Is there any way at all of hitting on a woman without making an absolute fool out of yourself?
Just wondering.


- I'm watching one of those ads for diet pills and wondering: When did it become ok for people to act like being fat is some sort of personal tragedy? It's great that you lost 35 pounds and look like a model now, but please don't act like you survived cancer or something.

Gainesville

- I made my bi-annual visit to the gym a couple of days back.

Guy I know: "Working out regularly in the mornings makes me more productive at work, you should try it too."

Me: "That will never work for me. I find it hard enough to get up and drink my tea."


- Went to Gainesville with a novice-driver-friend. Survived the drive.


- Met this guy who's travelling to India, who's carrying every certificate issued to him by any educational, testing, municipal or government agency with him on the flight. This includes his 8th standard conduct certificate which says that he displayed good character in middle school.

Somehow, I wasn't surprised to hear that.



- Note to Gainesville city planners: Unless there is some large scale migration going on from one part of Gainesville to another, it's a bad idea to have a junction with 4 lanes in one direction and only one lane in the other.


- Just came back from dinner at the Indian restaurant. H, who is usually the boss in such matters, says:

One idly, one onion rava dosai, one special uppma.

We wait for him to order his usual Uthappam, but he says he's done. That guy just isn't eating these days. Some girl matter, I think.

Nice Insult?

Perhaps the only thing more disturbing than your profound idiocy is the pride frequency with which you flaunt it.


That's a pretty nice insult, no?

The only problem is that the two people that I want to use it on (for independent reasons) are both people that I shouldn't really be picking fights with.

Question

Why are so many people writing abstract posts on love?

This is an incredibly disturbing trend.

Randomness

- The joys of premature generalization: The 20 odd Gujaratis I [know]/[have read about] have been male. There may be a small number of female Gujaratis, but the vast majority of Gujaratis are male.


- Remember this (third -)?

I was late for a tutoring appointment again and this time I stopped only at one light out of about twenty. 4 lights turned amber just as I was passing through them. If this keeps happening, I'm going to start wondering if I'm god's chosen one or something.


- When it's dark, I have trouble figuring out if the light is amber or red until I'm really close. Is that normal, or do I have some exotic vision deficiency?[1]


- The title of my next paper is going to be "A novel method for execution of safe lane changes in the absence of the right rear view mirror: Prediction of spatial and temporal traffic probability densities using Bayesian estimation".

Maybe.


- Now that I can read some Joyce without totally freaking out, I'm wondering if I should cultivate some intellectual pretensions. Maybe I will read Nietzsche or Kafka or Pavlov (or whatever it is that intellectuals read), and say things like "I'm not interested in physics in itself. I have only learnt physics because it helps me understand the metaphysics of the universe".





[1] I go around telling people that I'm color blind, but that's just a concise, if inaccurate, way of telling people that I bunked the LKG class where they taught us to identify colors.

Two links, one rant, two uninteresting observations.

- For some vague reason, this reminded me of the time I lost a couple of weeks [1] of work because I replaced the updated version of a folder with the backed up version instead of the other way around.

- Message for a nameless faceless person:

Since I am not an alumnus of the George Bush school of nuance as you perhaps are, I find it hard to encapsulate my views in pithy statements like 'Mera Bharat mahaan' and 'Real men don't watch Oprah'. My views might seem overly obtuse to you, but to me they are consistent with the fact that we live in a complex world.

- I always wonder at people who have Monday/Tuesday morning blues. It must be wonderful to get weekends off.

- I was going to title this post 'Rumble in the Bronx' but it seems like my readers don't appreciate my post-modernist system of nomenclature very much.

- I have now officially struck out 'Private Investigator' from the list of potential career options.





[1] Or 2 hours, I don't remember exactly. Or maybe I was about to do it, but I cancelled at the last second.

Well, I'm sure that either something bad happened or something bad was about to happen.

Jakkur

- The girl in the coffee shop who almost always sounds like she's in a bad mood was surprisingly nice on Friday. I empathize, the last day of the semester does that to you.


- Thanks to my new English teacher, I managed to read Dubliners without getting the nagging feeling that I was being cheated out of a climax.


- Shoot, I think this is my favorite post of all time. I like this one too.

-

Roomie1: Hey, we've run out of kitchen towels.
Roomie2: Just use a fresh roll of toilet paper instead.

The joys of student life.

- While on the topic of student life, I chose to spend a few extra minutes browsing the web this morning at the expense of taking a shower. It's tough to make the right choices that early in the morning.

Before you start writing "You haven't changed even a little" comments, let me inform you that my daily shower rate has increased to 0.933 showers a day (from 0.571 showers a day during my college days) .

- Some big shot from NOAA came to our lab meeting along with his wife. When she said "It was really interesting stuff", I wasn't sure if she was really really smart and she understood everything or if she was just being polite.

I know that certain readers of this blog are perennially ready to jump on me for being sexist, so I will clarify:

1. I didn't just assume that she was incapable of being an expert in atmospherics because she was a woman. Her exact words were (approximately) "I don't have a science degree, but I found it really interesting".

2. You probably don't need a science degree to understand the effect that the spatial resolution of Sea Surface Temperature estimates has on rain rate retrievals, but you would have to be really really smart. Which is what I said originally, so I assume there's no problem.

I am nothing if not politically correct.
-KG

Multi-tasking.

I love you honey.

I turned around, eyebrows raised, but she was only talking into her earpiece.

I stared at her, transfixed, unable to look away.

I miss you so much.

She didn't notice me.

She was doing her homework. Simultaneously, without looking, she was typing a message in her phone with her other hand.

My career: Updated

Hope exists.

Stuff

- A while back I tried to figure out how the climate models used to predict global warming work, and I thought that was really tough. But that seems like piece of cake now, when I'm trying to figure out how they decide who plays in the NCAA football national championship game.

- It think I've figured this out now: When a girl tells you that you look cute, it's a compliment. When a girl tells you that you are cute, it means you are dysfunctional in a pitiable but mildly amusing kind of way, sort of like a little puppy that's scampering around without the slightest clue about what's going on around it.

Nobody's ever told me I look cute, of course.

- I've gotten to have some long meandering conversations with some wonderful strangers in the last few days. My life is not totally lifeless, I guess.

True love.

- This post is not about true love, I was just indulging in some false advertising.

Sorry.

I guess it's some sort of psychological problem, maybe behaving like a silly eight year old makes me feel like I'm young again.

Getting old does strange things to you sometimes. When I was young, I didn't care about anything. Now it bothers me if my cell phone is not fully charged.

- Every gear change feels like a potential disaster.

- I'm running a little late for an appointment, and almost every light I go through is green. On the way back, when I don't care how long it takes, I have to stop at every light.

I'm thinking: "What, god loves me or something?"


- What to watch out for in the SA test series: Ganguly running Dravid out/ Dravid running Ganguly out.


- I'm going to give up on the motivational speaker thing, I think.