Proof of Global Warming

I just came across an irrefutable evidence on the existence of global warming and am presenting it to you without any delay (or comment).



And...for the record - I am not complaining!!

Jana Gana Mana

A classic for you on India's Independence Day

The Army as the New Religion

At dinner over the weekend, I was chatting with a PhD student who is working with 15th century art - specifically religious art in Italy where neighbours faces randomly appear in artist's depiction of religious situations. Our conversation hence centered around religion and art - topics where I certainly can hold my own. It was during this conversation that it struck me -

Religion has(/had) its positive aspects. It helped enhance the visual arts and music (at least in Christianity and Hinduism) and is thus, for the arts, like the army is for science. The benefits of the arts/science have seeped down to enrich the life of "civilians" - while serving their original intended purpose.

And yes, both (Army and Religion) were created to make us feel safe and have their fair (or larger than fair) share of problems - but let us not go there.

Amsterdam - as we saw it

The good and sometimes even exceptional,
1. The city itself. A small, intimate and un-pretentious city.
2. The two hotels we stayed in - Hotel Rembrandt Residence and Lloyd Hotel. Hotel Rembrandt Residence was in the heart of the canal belt and very close to most places of interest. The staff were very friendly and accommodating. Did I mention the great view over Singel?? We stayed the last night at Lloyd Hotel - a hotel with rooms from 1 to 4 stars. It was a unique experience with each room specially designed by leading Dutch designers. The 2 star rooms have 'open' toilets to save space while the three star rooms have a 'foldable' toilets. It is an expensive option but we felt it was well worth the experience - particularly for design buffs like us.
3. Food (Puccini bomboni needs a special mention here)

the bad
The city is not kid friendly. Amsterdam is certainly cyclist friendly with extensive bike lanes. The pedestrian walkways were too narrow in many places for us to walk two at a side let alone push a pram (or buggy as they call them). Even the transportation system (particularly trams) are not very conducive to taking your kid out. We had a tough time there.

and the downright ugly
Awful, awful weather. Need I say more.

Prime philosophy

I am currently reading The curious incident of the dog in the night-time by Mark Haddon. Here is a quote from the book (will leave a detail post on the book for later):

I think prime numbers are like life. They are very logical but you could never work out the rules, even if you spent all you life thinking about them.

I agree.

Crying as an error message!!

I was at the semi-annual technical seminar of the Natural Gas Systems Group ( a multidisciplinary group consisting of researchers from Chemical Engineering, Engineering Cybernetics and Energy and Process Engineering and a predecessor to The Gas Technology Center) last Wednesday. A few of my colleagues kept complaining about gPROMS, or to be more exact, the unintelligible error messages that it gives. Having worked developing open equation simulation software myself, I understand that it is not possible to come up with intelligible error messages every time. Open equation solvers give you more power, but at a cost. It is upto the model builder to build the model in small steps, testing along way so that one can easily identify the code causing the error. I wanted to tell my colleagues this, but what came out was very different.

"You want to talk about untelligible error messages? Imagine this: your 5 month year old girl wakes up in the middle of the night and cries out loud. You have no clue as to why she is crying as she just had her feed a couple of minutes ago. You try a couple of things to make her sleep, or atleast to keep quiet. Nothing works. Now that is what I call an unintelligible error message. Stop whining guys - you can atleast shut your computers off!!"

And looking back, it seemed that I whined :)

A thousand words and some more

For the next couple of months, I am planning on converting this blog into a sort of photo-blog. Not being in the writing business, it takes quite an effort to get out a half decent post. I have a few ideas for posts, but can not seem to get around to it. I will regularly post some pictures and in between try to get a couple of posts less than a thousand words.

So here goes. Is the b&w one better?

A Slice of New York

The streets of New York are full of life. This shot was taken in Jan 2002 (when I still lived in there) close to midnight outside ESPN zone in Times Square.