I think that we have been witnessing something absolutely fascinating over the last few years, periodic examples of leaderless revolutions which build momentum in a chaotic and unpredictable manner and spread to the widest reaches of the world at the speed of thought. The latest example of such an uprising was today's mass internet blackout [...]
Category Archives: Miscellaneous
Smell, nostrils, and averted ugliness
I was talking with some friends today about how the nose senses smell and how one can tell where the smell is coming from when I realized a cute little hypothesis which might actually have some truth in it. It appears to me that if smell were to travel through air in the way sound [...]
Sounds of the Tambourine
Though I know that evenin's empire has returned into sand Vanished from my hand Left me blindly here to stand but still not sleeping My weariness amazes me, I'm branded on my feet I have no one to meet And the ancient empty street's too dead for dreaming. and I remember those days when I [...]
Proust and Reading
In those times when I'm reading Proust or listening to Gulzar do I sometimes feel that my own linguistic inadequacy prevents me from expressing my own thoughts with the transparency and delicacy that I hold so dear in the language of some of the masters. There is something about Proust's prose, for example, which not [...]
All Greek and Latin
The other day I was talking to a Greek friend of mine when I realized, perhaps for the first time in my life, that there exist people in this world who actually use symbols like , etc. to communicate! I was so completely overwhelmed by this realization that I ended up spending the next half [...]
Taos, Santa Fe, NM
I have been in Santa Fe, New Mexico for the whole last week to attend the 'Phononics and Metamaterials 2011' conference. Professor Nemat-Nasser was giving the principal lecture of the conference and he asked Ali and me to attend it in order to learn what the other groups have been up to. It has been [...]
Pendulums, springs, and natural frequencies
I remember while preparing for the JEE I came across a simple spring mass system and was quite surprised by the fact that it should have a natural frequency at which it must vibrate when left to its own devices. An analogous but more intuitive system is a regular clock pendulum. The pendulum completes one [...]
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Recursion
Today I was thinking about recursion and came across this famous painting by Escher,
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Rain
I'm sitting here, near my window, and the heavy sky is throbbing above in deep grunting discolored voices, threatening the pane with ominous liquid possibilities. I quite like the word liquid. It's terse, handsome and upright. If I were to bestow upon it the vestiges of a human form, I would imagine it to be [...]
Abhiman
In this vast sea of human interactions, upon whose surface emotions, both tragic and comic, poignant and trivial, ebb and flow, gather momentum and break, and mix in a turbulent confusion, every so often there comes along a little line, a piece of poetry, a thought at once both supremely elegant and precisely striking, even [...]