Official Website

To all ye COEPians, Ive made a lot of changes to the COEP entry on Wikipedia. Please feel free to visit and make any changes or additions. Since we have no control over the atrocious official website, this is the best we can do.

On Red lights

Second red light in a row
Apt to ensnare in its cage
Since you're ten minutes too late.

Third red light in a row
More red kittens crossing my lane
Mean more green ones at my computer games?

Fourth red light in a row
Road rage is hard to defeat
Unless a Beatle croons back-seat.

Second green light in a row
Only on your way back home
To watch the vacuous box alone.

Third green light in a row
Probability's dice is loaded
In your favour when least needed.

Fourth green light in a row
Either a drought or a deluge
God's mind is hard to gauge.

The Getty Museum

I recently uploaded pictures from my trip down the west coast with my parents on Webshots. If you plan to visit the Los Angeles metro area, be sure to go to the Getty.

Nanny 911: Parles vous Mandarin?

Whenever any bright young child visits our home in Pune, my father never ceases to remind its parents to expose their kids to as many languages as they can. It seems like a lesson he learnt after I was grown-up beyond redemption. I am not an extraordinary polyglot by Indian standards at all. I speak Marathi, Hindi, English and some German. My mother can speak some Gujarati and Telugu as well, thanks to her friends in school but clearly she made no attempt to rub the skill onto me. Ofcourse first-timer parents aren't terribly experienced and technically I should be thankful they were smart enough to make up for the lack of experience. :-)(As you can see I didn't have anywhere else to go with that last sentence. So it was practically extracted out of me at gun-point.)

I used to be "padik" (habitually joblessly present) at a Kannada neighbour's house as a kid, but found myself struggling with "Neer Beku" (Water please) on childhood jaunts to Bangalore. Also the most useful phrase in Telugu that one has to know is "Po Amma!" (Shooo woman) used to drive off beggars on our way to Tirupati. That's the sum and total of my Dravidian language skills. I should write a Travel book for Indians someday, given my extensive language skills. ;-)

Be that as it may, American parents seem to have taken quite a fancy to the idea of teaching their kids many languages early in their childhood.(This is probably relegated to the richest few.) What's more some are fighting hard to find a nanny who can teach their kids Mandarin. The BBC has an interesting news-story about nannies who can speak Chinese, and how some of them make $20,000 more than other nannies... about $70,000 at times. I am beginning to think I should learn Mandarin and switch jobs now. I could go into stock-market investing full-time with the odd flourish of "Shishyani"(Thank you) at the kid during the day.

If you want to read the story in full please click here:

War Mongering in Persia

Iran's saber rattling doesn't surprise me much. There are a lot of inter-related news-stories at work here and here is what I read between the lines.

America spends more than 6 billion dollars a month to maintain a presence in Iraq, and military recruitment and reserves are nose-diving. Iran knows that America is weak monetarily and militarily and hence Iran can afford to be on the offensive. What’s more America’s withdrawl from the region is imminent, some point in the future. Iran stands the most to gain, as it can win over the majority Shia population of Iraq with a theocracy and gain greater influence over the oil politics. Most likely the insurgents in Iraq are funded by Iran, and that fits like a charm in the equation above.

Iran would like to rouse all other Arab countries to join in and fight on their side. Hence the statements disputing Holocaust by Ahmedinejad. He knows that there are many divisions in the Arab world, but he also knows that there is consensus on the issue of Israel. War-mongering, Ahmedinejad is thy name.

Nuclear energy for peaceful purposes my ass! They have one of the richest supplies of natural gas in the world. What do they need nuclear energy for?
I am worried about India's natural gas pipeline from Iran now. India needs to look for alternate means to satisfy Indian industry now.

I think Iran is hoping for a chain-reaction starting from a UN offensive against Iran to boil over and result in an all out war across the Middle-East against America and Israel. If they succeed, we could have a 3rd World War on our hands.

"When you reach for the stars you may not quite get there, but you won't come down with a handful of mud either."

"Prodigious": That's the only word I have to describe this truly extraordinary book I read this weekend. I am a very difficult customer to satisfy when it comes to an author's job of trying to keep a reader interested. More often than not I tend to nod off half-way through. Homer Hickam's book "October Sky" simply is a must read. It was originally titled "Rocket Boys", an anagram for October Sky, before the hit movie of the same name. I had seen the trailer and a part of the movie sometime on Star Movies, but something stopped me from watching the whole movie at the time.

The book is a memoir that recounts the story of a group of high-school students in the Appalachian mining community of Coalwood, who build rockets overcoming numerous obstacles and finally represent their state at the National Science Fair. More specifically the tale is that of "Sonny" Hickam's formative years. The journey is marked by many things we can all relate to. The Sputnik and Werner von Braun inspire Sonny to become a NASA engineer and create rockets. It brought back my dreams of turning into an astrophysicist and being inspired by Stephen Hawking after reading "A Brief History of Time". Sonny's team has this unrelenting desire to improve what is already a very commendable effort midway through the book. This quest for perfection makes the book a Jonathan Livingston Seagull meets Wonder Years story. With the mining disaster at Sago, West Virginia taking place this week, the tragedies in the book seemed eerily like a page out of the newspapers.


Homer Hickam with Mrs. Hickam

The book kept me awake and on the edge of my seat all the way through. There are so many twists and turns in the story, that you just can't set the book aside until you reach the other cover. It is only based on true events, so it is partially fictional. In addition to being an engineer, Homer Hickam is also a great writer judging by his ability to transport us back 50 years back in time. The impact of his life was so great that he was one of the torch bearers for the Olympic torch leading to Atlanta. His team is honored with the "Rocket Boys Day" in West Virginia.

First Tremors

My first 11 months in California have been very pleasant. After living in Madison for 2 years, one feels strangely privileged for the chance to live in an area with mild winters. Surprisingly Tuesday was the first time that I experienced the San-Andreas at work below me. So good weather comes at a price... you're now sitting atop a fickle fault line at the mercy of plate tectonics. The radio on my way to work never ceases to remind me: "In California every day is earthquake season", making a queer allusion to the Deep South where hurricanes only occur during a specific part of the year. Ideally I am supposed to stock my car with water and enough food to last me two days... but I've not done that.

On Tuesday though, I was a little annoyed when all of a sudden the lid of my cabinet started making noises. I then realized that I could feel some back and forth vibrations at my hands near the keyboard as well. Suddenly the leaves of the plants on my desk also started swaying a little. I am on the top floor at work, closer to the edge of the building. Given the building's earthquake-aware design, I am probably one of the people who would get amplified shock waves from around the state.

I walked across the aisle to another co-worker's cube to ask him if he felt anything, and the tremors didn't seem to have registered with him. He said "Oh there are small one's all the time. If you feel a big one, just duck under your table!"

So then I checked with the US Geological Survey Website. I also found a link to a seismometer at Stanford but didn't see anything substantial on the waves there. The USGS Website listed some minor 2.9 magnitude earthquakes around here but none really substantial enough to be felt.
But this does seem like the most seismically active region of the United States given the USGS data.

There was a larger earthquake down in Mexico but that's about a 1000 miles away. I highly doubt I would feel that one. So I really wonder what it was... my roommate felt the first few shocks too but I am beginning to wonder if it was just some construction work going on somewhere in the building. :)