hi there!! Happy New 2009!

Hey there!

3^rd semesters over matey!! Seems like weve got plenty to do!!

Twas a very successful semester for me- I finished off the ten seasons of FRIENDS- although a meagre first viewing only! But 20X24X10=4800 mins=30 hrs of popcorn popping was not ALL I did!! I also passed a chemistry course in spectroscopy (having flunked the midsems by one point- but made up good time to claim 85% in the final assessment), passed a physics course in Quantum Mechanics which was over-the-line mathematical, loved a complex analysis course, proved myself a SENSITIVE scientist wannabe (humanities course in “Indian Heritage in sciences” baby!), and watched many more movies of my kind.

I also grew a goatee and shaved it, twice, notwithstanding my status as a bovine creature. There was also a great deal of growing up, yknow, philosophically and emotionally; but the present stand is to put all the growing up behind the linen!! We do need to grow sometime soon, mind our own business and manners- but give it a break grumpy; we aren’t 20 yet!!

New year is coming up, and the resolutions I take grow increasingly stupid!! Ahh , the time to start all over again!! We do need that now, don’t we? I wish I had a bunch of Donald Shimoda quotes to throw at you, but then do you know at all who he is?

Ayn Rand does write beautifully and she climbed into my hallowed unrankable authors list with Tolkien, Rowling, Richard Bach, Erich Segal- after I read only one chapter of “Atlas Shrugged” (talk of me being biased from the hype she has around people- but the factor is that she satisfied all my expectations- she could have let me down, like Rowling in “Deathly Hallows”- but AR didnt).

VARIABLE CHANGE from movie ‘21’

And last of all the insight into variable change that my musings revealed to me only this morning. You see, in the movie 21, the protagonist who goes by the name of Ben is a brilliant young student who gets into a ‘card counting’ club in MIT, and the subsequent repercussions on his lowly life. In my opinion, it is not a timeless piece at all, but enjoyable like all crap in this world is. There however Kevin Spacey stars as Miki Rosen, the MIT prof with a helluva gift of oratory and the leader of this card counting team who go into Vegas at weekends to beat the game of Blackjack using logic and cool head. So, Miki asks Ben an apparent paradox, also known as ‘Monty Hall Paradox’ which I will now proceed to explain.

Miki tells Ben to imagine ( I am trying my hands at my own version of Kevin Spacey’s inimitable style in this monologue) that he is in a game show; the host offers him three doors behind one of which is “brand new sports car” and two goats behind the others. Ben chooses door ‘1’ in this choice. Before declaring the result however the host spices things up when he undoes door ‘3’ behind which there is a goat. Then Miki asks Ben if he would switch his choice to ‘2’ or not.

Heres the key- Ben chooses to swich to door ‘2’.

This decision, he says, is propelled by cold hard logic, because the host knows everything and the unlocking of door ‘3’ changes everything; ‘1’ has a 33% percent chance of having the car, while ‘2’ has 66% odds of having the car and hence “thank-you-very-much for that extra 33%”, he says.

People are very confused by this explanation, as was I, because apparently the unlocking of the door ‘3’ redistributes the odds to 50:50 between ‘1’ and ‘2’. BUT what I forgot, and most people do, is that the choice to unlock the door ‘3’ by the host is a conscious choice, and in doing so he seals the odds to one-thirds and two-thirds respectively.

Lets examine the 33% case when the car is originally behind ‘1’; if Ben switches then, then he loses. Note that the host would not show ‘1’ and would not show the door with the car.

For the 66% case that the car is either behind ‘2’ or ‘3’, the host eliminates ‘3’ and now if one imagines that the car cannot be behind ‘1’ which IS our assumption here, one is 100% certain that it is behind ‘2’. If the host uncovers either ‘2’ or ‘3’, the response is the same, make the switch for a 66% chance of win.

Summing up quite, at the beginning:

‘1’=> 33%

‘2’ or ‘3’ => 66%

The host eliminates ‘3’, one is left with,

‘1’=> 33%

‘2’=> 66%

This required quite some thinking, but still people convince themselves that this is actually not a correct explanation at all; it requires one to keep track of the abstraction long enough to see the answer.

The Curse of the Evil Prof.

Tuesdays have always been pretty hectic for me, at least ever since I entered college. The morning, as usual, was fully packed with classes on all slots, & after lunch, I head for my first physics lab. I'd always heard from my coaching teachers, the names of the experiments I was about to encounter & also done some reading about the practicals in IIT (Chetan Bhagat's 'Five Pt. Someone'!!lol). So, I was pretty confident. I've been forging readings ever since I went to my first science lab in school, so my confidence level was further boosted. Even made fun of a guy who said that my 1st experiment was to be in a dark room & he was totally frightened, after the experiment, to go to any dark room. That the room was cursed, the experiment was cursed!

So, I went inside, feeling how much I'd love doing all my experiments in there itself, for there was air-conditioning in the room! My first experiment-'Grating Spectrometer'. My instructor for the experiment- Prof. S.N. Bhatia, a name none of us from P4/2 batch would ever forget. I had known it to be a difficult experiment with sure shot time wastage on the set-up part (the exp. in itself is very small, only the setting up of the apparatus is time consuming), the first time. But, I had that the experiment is somehow completed in the given 3 hrs. Huh, were they all bluffing when they said the last line? It took me 2hrs to identify that I was to reach even till the Schuster's method. After 10 more minutes wasted, where the Prof. was shouting at me for being such a lousy bastard, good for nothing, bribed entry into the IIT, he came to check out my status.

I've always felt, though never actually done, that I have every right to shout & abuse, at least twice as much as he did, a Prof. if he himself is unable to do an experiment of which he is the instructor. Whatsay? I don't have even 30mins to do the experiment, & he says, "Maybe there is a problem here." What 'maybe'?? :-o You were trying for the past 20mins. There has to be a problem. Pair me up with someone else. Help, help!! This experiment has 6marks contribution in the total. Somebody plz call 911! Somebody do something. Oh God, I wanted to do well in this sem at any cost and this prof., he has made me a pauper before I could say 'any cost'! He has screwed up my 1^st experiment and with that my confidence level…

Well, that's how I felt. But, the prof. never did. I was still stuck up with the same apparatus, but was asked to bypass that step, for then. How incredulous…

But, then someone had called 911. Oh no, it wasn't 911, it was a Godsend, my guardian angel in the form of a lab assistant. He came, and with him, returned my life, which was going out of the Dark Room, like the light from the high powered bulbs, on our tables, on the click of a button. He came really as a savior, a messiah, and said, "Bhatia ko jaane de, fir paanch minute me tera Schuster's khatam kar doonga. Tu bas uske baad apna readings jaldi se le lena. Yeh Bhatia bada hi ghatia hai!". And we both stuck to our word. I took only 30mins extra time & completed my experiment, and got real poor marks, but in my own P4/2, it was an average score.

This was when I realized how that superb air-conditioning became the DARK ROOM, all in capitals, when it became the dungeon, the a/c & the darkness felt like I was in a drawer of the mortuary of AIIMS, and this was when I decided never to return to that room again, never to go back to that death chamber…

Thank God, I came out alive!

PS: I did go back for the last 2 experiments and actually cracked them, & got an overall AB in the course. Maybe someone had broken the 'curse of the evil prof.'!!

OSL- The “Coolest” Place After Midnight!!

I'd never oppose any of you who say, "hostel life is the best", that you'd give anything to come back to the hostel. But, this article is for some of us, you may call spoilt brats, who are ready to forgo the best place… It is for those of us, who want to find the coolest place, literally, and not the best place. Being a Delhite, for me living without A/C is like a nightmare (I can assure you coz I have lived that way too), and Bombay, I'd say is much worse than Delhi, with the unbearable humidity combined with equally abysmal temperature conditions, which at some point even crossed that of Delhi! The only solution was to find an air-conditioned environment. And this is an article about that night, when I along with Twish, or Charsi, as we call him, made that extra effort for the greater good. It is about that night when the two of us, without even caring about the exam the day after went out and searched for THE HEAVEN, for the place which could satisfy the three basic necessities of ours, "the spoilt brats", A/C, WiFi, and Plug point!

We had been to the library once, but found out that even there the A/C is switched off at 9pm. 9 PM! That's precisely when a normal IITian even starts to think that he has books which should be utilized for studying rather than as laptop stands for the HP and Dell laptops! That's when we, after the 1^st course of dinner, think that we should plan the day's study! That's when it all starts and they end it then…why? L. Why should we then go to the liby, a place so far off, when the same condition is available even in the hostel. Maybe there is a bit of noise, with the 5.1 Bose speakers shouting for us to come and dance to those foot tapping tunes of some Punjabi singer, but then of there is no A/C why the hell will we travel so far? Just to get tired and spoil the "study mood", and sit in the staff canteen? We needed a place…a place where we can do whatever we want to do, study, play, chat, and everything, and also should have A/C. Comp Centre was an option, so we went there on that unforgettable night, loaded with enthusiasm and our laptop bags, just to be left high and dry…that place was nothing more than a teaser! You go inside, you have A/C, a nice shaant environment, but internet…you wont be able to connect your laptops though…we even tried using the lan wires there just to realize that we hadn't achieved anything, but surely had plugged out a couple of comps from the internet! And just outside what we found was no A/C, but a nice WiFi environment, and yeah, here also we had shaanti! A real teaser…high and dry…

From there, dejected though we are, we still do not give up on our search for that heaven of a place, and hop relentlessly, from MB to GG to KReSIT to where not, to only find everywhere that we, like the wildlife of today, are now in a place which ain't our natural environment. Our natural environment and our basic necessities were no longer available. We realized the bitter truth, that though we are in one of the top institutes of the world, we can't find even a single place that'd suit our comfort, and where we could study without that physical and mental discomfort caused but the unbearable weather. on our way back to the hostel, to become the laughing stock of the whole wing, we stop at the most unlikely of places-the Old Software Lab. It wasn't like we had never been there, I used to literally live there during our CS101 days. I used to study there, sleep there, and used to come back to the hostel only for the morn brushing and bath! But the moment they banned our logins there(after the CS101 got over), I never stepped back into that lab. I was standing there today, way past midnight(I think it was around 2.45 or 3 in the morn), waiting for Twish to switch on his WiFi and confirm that we as usual weren't in the right place. But, as all of you bollywood watchers would have realized, we struck gold this time, or as I can write now, with the rising inflation and the price of crude, we struck oil! We had everything we needed right there, in front of us. This was it…we had done it. This was our very own Terebethia, and that night, the 2 of us had found that magic rope and forged the bridge to Terebethia!

Every night since then, we were there unfailingly, after midnight, playing typeracer or NFS Carbon, or chatting or watching Chak De, & also, I forgot, studying during the free time, for our ongoing endsems!