Ever since the softball season started, /me has been wondering Why is our Team Fiziks sucking so bad?. We have had our usual practice sessions (with rather diminishing, not-so-encouraging attendance) but our performance had been way below our usual standards. Games that we won in the first six weeks have been close escapes and we even managed to drop a game, to become the laughing stock of many a bar-discussions. Turns out that yours truly was the culprit and I found it out during a Church League game last Tuesday. How did I do that, you ask? Read on…

Very uncharacteristically, I arrive just a minute (or so) before the scheduled starting time and fortunately, both teams had shortage of players - game starting only 15 minutes later. While warming up, I pull my hanky (a.k.a. hand kerchief) out of my pocket and 31 cents fall out of it! Call me superstitious or anything else you please, I carry 21 cents in my hanky (the same hanky) for every game I play and God knows how the extra dime got in there. I wouldn’t rule out the foul play by other teams here, they might be trying to beat us from the superstition point of view as well… (just kidding - am I, may be not).

Once the extra dime was thrown out and the original 21 cents remained in my pocket, amazing things (or the usual things for our point of view) start to happen - in that Church league game, we manage to beat the other team by 17 runs with only 9 players on our roster. Come to Grad league, we pile up 29 runs (two 10 run innings) in first 5 innings (well, the other team was PE) and almost zero errors on field. From now on, I have to make sure that everything is alright before I step on to the field… This and other similar things (discussions with a friend of mine, etc.) took me back to Quantum Mechanics of Life (my own formulation of life and its wierdness from a quantum mechanical view point) I used to do while in Masters in Bangalore University, India.

For starters, let me start with some mathematical foundation. If you know differentiation and integration (basic calculus), ignore these and move on, though you probably wouldn’t loose anything by reading it First things first, the following expression gives one example of an Eigen Value Equation (Eigen in German means Characterstic):

In plain English, all this means is that (d/dx) is an operator acting on some function, e^(ax) - with a result that the form of the function is unaffected but multiplied by a constant (a). This constant, a, is called the Eigen Value of this equation. So, how does this relate to our life, you ask? Read on… you will find out soon. Anything that we get (or we don’t get) basically boils down to a three step process:

1. It all starts with Desire for a certain thing (I call this the First D operator, denoted by D₁). Its eigen values range from near-zero (for a saint) to near-infinity (for people like you and me).
2. Then somehow, somebody decides whether we actually Deserve what we Desire for (I call this the second D operator, denoted by D₂). Its eigen values are either a zero (we don’t deserve it) or one (we deserve it) and is highly time- and circumstance dependent.
3. We desired for something, that somebody somehow also thought that we deserve it but then comes the all powerful Destiny operator (what I call the third D operator, denoted by D₃). Similar to Deserve operator, its eigen values are either a zero (we don’t get it) or one (we get it) and is highly time- and circumstance dependent.

So, putting all these together and taking Mathematicians’ help, we have another beautiful expression:

It’s not too hard to guess/understand what ??? stand for and purists might object that this is not even an Eigen Value Equation as Mind is left in a different state (for example, happiness/disappointment) after such on operation. But my claim is that you still get to keep your mind and I merge the state of the mind with ???. In a nutshell, Nothing ever happens before its time and destiny AND nothing ever stays after its time and destiny. If nutshell was this simple and easy to understand, why did I write all those expressions, you ask? It’s just me, and if everything was simple and easy, it ain’t fun anyways

Moving on to other things that have happened in the past seven days, progress in research has been kinda slow (partly due to my procastination which was initiated by excessive CPU usage) but looks to be fine for now. Our plans of expanding our Beowulf cluster had to be put on hold due to some design related issues and hopefully, we will have something by Fall semester. During the dinner with Eli, Karen S and from an email from Erin, I learnt some neat tricks in Photoshop, which I have been extensively using in many places.

Recently, I was kinda hired by GSC (Graduate Student Council) to be their web-master/system-support kinda guy. With all due respect to some products, most of the Microsoft products suck very bad. Probably, person(s) who worked previously in this project weren’t aware of this harsh reality - so, they seem to have designed it using Microsoft Word and just copied over files onto a Linux server. I have often heard people complain that Windows is User-Friendly while Linux/Unix isn’t - but this beauty (called User Friendliness) seems to go just skin deep. For example: for every one worthy line of HTML code, Word/FrontPage, etc. seem to put 25 additional lines of crap. Though the outer apperance might seem OK to many, it’s a nightmare from a coding point view (Code should be like a poem, an anonymous said once upon a time). After spending much of my weekend on this project and using the hidden beauty of Linux (shell scripting) and CSS, guess I have managed to make it beautiful - both from inside and outside. As of now, I can’t provide the link to the new version but you will hear from me (or from someone else) sooner or later.

Yesterday, Tim Twining took me canoeing in Sturgeon River Sloughs, just outside Chassel (Chassel is another tiny little village about 7 miles from Houghton) and I must say, I enjoyed it a lot. Early morning quiet atomosphere with only paddling, raffling of leaves, & bird/animal like sounds to hear, fog on the water surface, many forms of flora and fauna I had never seen before, … made it quite the experience. Needless to mention, my camera was busy most of the time and as a result, some snaps are posted below. I agree they aren’t the best and could definitely have been lot better but under the given circumstances and given my amateurish skills at shooting such things, I will take them for now.

During some of the recent (and not-so-recent) events, I have come to realize that I cook decently well and was asked by few to post the recipe for couple of things. Though professional cooks/chefs and my mom may not agree with my recipes, but probability that they will ever read them is, if not smaller, as good as Physicists reaching absolute zero of temperature or something escaping out of a blackhole. (yeah, I know - got a bit geekier here). Instead of posting them here and showing off my ignorance/stupidity, I have decided to mail them in person.