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THIS BLOG HAS MOVED

and has been re-established here.

Desert Studies Center

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This blog has moved to ... http://www.saifali.wordpress.com/

Which OS are you ?

I took another dumb quiz .... and the results were so devastating I was almost in tears. But I wont hide'em for anyone (there was an option to take the quiz again if you didnt like the result ... but how flaky is that ... )
Which OS are You? ah well. sigh

Unfinished Business

 

Rescue Mission

In a desperate attempt to rescue my blog, I have resorted to changing the template altogether which means I lose my blogroll and links sidebar .. ah well. And in the spirit of rehaul I thought a new picture might be in order but it turns out you cant upload a picture directly from the local host to the profile. You have to first upload to the web using Picasa or something and then supply the URL. ..sigh. Well....here it is.  

On top of our game

For want of better engagement, I might attempt to trace the development of the diversification of physical activity in human beings. We start out with very little physical leverage and in the first year of our lives remain for the most part supine being able only to kick our legs and flail our arms about which are the two actions which are used to signal everything from hunger to deep philosophical angst. This gives way to disoriented and uncoordinated movement with legs and then to short spurts of coordinated movement (the quintessential baby video where the baby breaks into a wobbling run to end up in a heap at the end of the room). A higher social consciousness (kindergarten, birthday parties when we actually knows its our birthday) there is a marked rise (inevitably) in the consumption of sugar. And when this consumption passes a certain threshold (on say a particularly wild party) the major form of physical activity is meaningless commotion. Running around while screaming and in throes of chocolate-induced hysteria, rolling on the grass while pulling out wads of it (I promise that I once saw a little boy at a party wolf down all of seven Ferrero Rochers, lift the pet-cat by its tail and slingshot it at the little girl). Its the next phase which brings in the element of competition. Gali cricket/football/tennis lessons (depending). This is the time the parents say to each other “he/she has become too aggressive. We should consider a ping-pong table.” This is the longest and most tortuous phase of the pursuit of physical feats in the life of a person. Some of us just dont got it. So our parents come and watch us the sporting contests in school…as a group of athletic figures sprint past them followed by their progeny who jogs by waving at them. By and by, the element of competition rises and rises and reaches a kind of crescendo around the time of senior year. I know that that is the most serious Ive ever got in sporting events. and…then it ebbs again. Now, the sporting encounters are leisurely and imbued with a mature sense of “games should be for fun, not for winning or losing,” which is a good way of saying “lets face it, neither of us can survive the whole set, so lets play best of three and allow underarm serves.” So here I am (or we are for my peers and contemporaries). The other day, a group of us graduate students decided to start playing tennis (exclusivel grads, because them undergrads will beat the crap out of us). For one it took me some time to beat off a bout of giggles as I saw four spectacled gents assuming their positions for a game of doubles. I have only recently got glasses so I thought I could probably do without them. Then I saw a furry blob hit a smaller yellow and furry blob at me. So my last attempt to look like a serious-ish athlete was in vain and I went back and put on my glasses. The moment I had put them on, all sporting spirit left my body. I was overwhelmed by a sense of “this is only for fun, its not for winning or losing.” Dang it. I had officially stepped into sporting adulthood. Our tennis is still at the delicate nascent stage where all the games are won by breaking serves. So when we actually start winnning on our own serve, we might actually hope to at least create an illusion that its real tennis that we’re playing. But this is turning out to be a depressing account of our sporting adventure. So I will add that I feel much better after having started once again. And I will keep your guys posted on the progress. Statistics to watch out for …. number of double-faults per game (per game yes, not per set), number of people serving underarm .. etc etc

Moving On

I have decided to graduate to Wordpress which apparently is supposed to be way more in these days in blogsphere. Plus this annoying blank space was getting on my (our?) nerves. So ... surfs up! .... move along to http://saifali.wordpress.com/ for the latest posts. However, I will not be brutal and abandon this blog cold turkey. It will contiue to run and all posts will go up on both sites ... so if you dont mind scrolling down each time, feel free to read here. Though I do believe my Wordpress blog should be some fresh air.

"Hold it Mister, the potatoes are mine." : An entry on the crisis of communal living.

Pivotal in the life of a grad student in the USA are roommates. And here I dont mean to mislead people, because roommate-roommate relationships in an undergrad-hostel/dorm situation are completely different from the ones that develop when you're living in an apartment shared by graduate-students. In an undergrad hostel...you're younger, which is not really the most important thing ... and you're less wise .... which is. You are willing to risk just about everything you have (which is usually very little) to cover for your roommate who is generally also your best friend. Also, most of the time is spent on how to get the lecturer to cry in class tommorow. This is not what happens in graduate-student inhabited spaces. There is for starters ... much more at stake so everyone has to (to use one of the most annoying platitudes) ..."get serious". There is no mess (mess, as in eating place ... there is plenty of the other kind) so everyone has to cook, do laundry (Im referring here to grad-student situations in the USA), study, work and lead what maybe called at least in some far-fetched way - a life. There is no time for wholesome activities like, talking about utter nonsense till 2 am, finishing Quake 4 in 1.5 days and so on. Central to the roommate-roommate interaction is the issue of cooking. That is what (as I have realized recently) glues together the people sharing the house in some way. So ... to employ brutal reductionism .... your roommate is the guy you're living with so that you get to pay less rent and cook only two days in a week. If you're wondering what caused me to objectively analyse this, I will tell you so now dear grasshopper. For some reason, the "cooking-turn-system" has been abolished in our house, so everyone is repsonsible for their own sustenance. You;d think that that would not really ramify in a big way, but I have found to the contrary. It has dawned on me that the cooking turn is what kept a lof of stuff in order until now. For example, groceries. If one guy cooks and everyone eats (or has the option of eating) then its ok if the cost of the ingredients is shared but not if people are only cooking for themselves. Then we must look at everyone's preferences, someone eats only potato, someone doesnt touch them, someone is watching their weight so will not consume sugar ... I can already see several fractions (if not derivatives) in the equation for the household finances. But hey...we're engineers ... thats what we're good at, complicating things miserable and then trying to make sense of them. The solution (a pragmatist would say) is, everyone buys whatever they want, no common account for the house. Good.... thats good.... and we have already half-implemented this approach ... which is why there are at least 3 identical bags of coriander in the fridge (aah, so there's something we all eat). Then we could further correct our approach and say....we share the expenses for a lowest common denominator list of items and other things we buy separately .... the problem currently being investigated is exactly this list. What are the things we all eat (coriander, we know now). The situation is however complicated still .... and I will not elaborate so take my word for it. So these days, after we're done researching hardware-accelerated texture mapping, combinatorial optimizations, solid-state device dynamics and routing protocol for mobile-adhoc networks in school ... .we come back in the evening and gape open-mouthed at each other and scratch our heads wondering what to do about the cooking. I've been reading for a class texts by visionary philosophers which talk about how humanity is being transformed into a collective intelligence and how we are no longer individuals but a singular distributed consciousness and how thats a good thing because the whole is greater than the sum of its parts and what not .... clearly these philosopher dudes are round the bend. If anyone has not noticed the irony I have so desperately tried to imbue the text with .... I request that you do so now (and itd be nice too if you could take your hand off your chin and chuckle in a disinterested way). Now ... I must find a place where I can sleep tonight ... because I know that tonight my roommates have a great reason to unify .... to beat the crap out of that Saif.

Rain Clutter

All of us have in our houses objects of mysterious persistence. Things which year after year continue to lie unused, unclaimed and unquestioned on shelves, in cupboards and drawers, under beds. Antiquated to the extent that it is no longer clear why they were there in the first place and it is definitely unknown who exactly they belong to or who put them there. Particular objects may vary from a household to the other but the phenomenon is definitely universal. My house .... for example, proudly academic ... books ... dusty, moth eaten pages of obscurity ... tapes (both VHS and audio), assorted sporting goods including a tennis ball split in half, TT pads with the rubber padding torn off, cricket bat with a shaky handle. These are the more normal categories of clutter. Among the more interesting ... half empty bottles of dubious looking fluids, old medicine, what looks like ordinary water filled in small plastic bottles, bits of metal from old key chains, keys and locks which so do not match, hammers, weird door-knobby looking things and rusty nails fill up the insides of drawers, never used boxxes of candles, greeting cards from completely strange people ... then there are things in the category of ... bits of stuff .... I have no other way of saying it ... bits of stuff ... thats what it is .... a long forgotten piece of what I think is a neem stick meant to be used as a toothbrush. that ... is the general state of clutter in my household. Since I'd been living away for a year when I visited home this time, I regarded my home more from the perspective of a concerned occupant than an indifferent dweller. and decided to do away with the junk once and for all. So I started doing the rounds of the house with a trash bag in my hand and started sweeping things off the shelves into it. But it wasnt as easy as I thought. Regardless of the fact that the useless-junk I was throwing away was exactly that - useless-junk, people in my house had become attached to it. It had become part of them. So as I heaved shelves and shelves of half-empty perfume and cream bottles, my mother tailed me all over saying ... "not that, I will give it to the housemaid" (note that over the 10 and some years that that bottle has been lying there, many maids have been hired and fired but that bottle didnt make it in to the hands of a single one of them). Ultimately, I was barred from chucking all the bottles I had collected in the bag ... so it was agreed that I leave it in one corned until my mom decides what to do with them (one alternative was that she take them to the "craft with waste material class" that she teaches ... a good idea youd think, but heaven knows when it will happen). I then made my way to the tapes and book section. Now....it is an absolute mystery to me how some of the items in this section came to be in my house. And what is worse is that Im positive that they were brought in by me. At the cost of my reputation, I will reveal some of the titles that had enjoyed there stay on my shelf. I was extra hasty first of all in removing and crushing to bits a VHS titled "Funniest Moments of the WWF" lest anyone start asking questions. And it beats me ... totally....why I would ever have been interested in a treatise on the "The Fodder Situation in the Savannah". Then there were books which I had obviously put up under the category off "never to be read but put up because makes good impression when guests go through bookshelf" .... "Ideas in Science" by obscure Russian author, "Discourse on Method" by Rene Descarte, "Sidelights on Relativity" by Einstein .... as if. So I brought down a pile of books and tapes and stood over the trash can and started tossing each one in after a brief examination. this went on for a while when I noticed that they were not making that satisfying clattering sound when they fell into the trash can. I turned around to see my dad standing behind me and catching them clean off the air before they could fall in and stacking them on the other side. His thoughts were that he could take them to the office where the empty covers could be used. So, I gave up more or less but it was all not in vain. At least I got to destroy some of the evidence of the trash I used to watch/read/listen to before anyone could say...''hey you pseudo-academic twit...you were a junkie".