IISER up next!

well well!!
post the iit exams this is going to be my first meaningful gibberish(_note that i can be quite comprehensible when i want to!).
sisters and brothers of the kvpy community! i am at iiser kolkata!
here we are taught, as we were all informed during the summer camp of last year, all the four disciplines of science... pcmb that is.
but what we are actually aiming at is fusing these lines together, and promoting the scientific community as a whole.(this was my version of the iiser brochure documents!)
now for the real picture, iiser kolkata has no hostel and campus of its own and we are the first of many future batches(technically 2nd, but egotising is an important skill these days!).
the hostel is pretty far from the institute and we reach there by bus.
the highlight though is that we have no restrictions on the noise level we make at hostels and ,this is important, no protocols for punishment.
so everything you do is a trend setter (applause!)
apart from that , all you get here is a bunch of marginally intelligent (modesty?maybe!) people packed up, and voila!!
the effects are quite satisfying!!
we have a fab physics course, lapping up the intricacies of mechanical systems in general and exploring whats been wrong with the high school matter.
the computing course(read mathematics practical) is complementing the same course- we learnt python and gnuplot and together they help us model novel mechanical systems and see how they behave-- visualization that is!
the chemistry and biology take their toll -- i am not intersted in either but still its nowhere near physics in fabricational capacity.
but our biology department is exceptional and contains both good human beings and pedagogues(they usually are.) and there is an overall interest in biology because of them.
the maths is the boring now, but i intend to take it up afterwards-- we are doing the cornerstones of calculus now.
i guess that it got a tad tooo long, but you have to give in to egoTism (egoism with a T for talk, that is) sometime!
thats it.
about other kvampyiians,
sunita panda is studying mech. in nit trichy,
abhijit awadhiya is in iiserpune or niser,
jyothi v nair (bangalore camp) is in iiser kol
......... uh thats all,
and i have material for a post or two now!

From IIT KGP with Love ...

Hi KVamPYs,

me glad 2 be bak on the blog, and nice post somani, u just inspired the blogger in me, and here i am pushing aside all my work,..

IIT is all about the sprit, the soul of engineering and technology, a place where ppl eat, breath and drink tech... literally ...

We do all sort of things here (except study of course...;)) currently am in a the organizing of ROBOTIX 08, the biggest robotics fest in south asia ... appart from that, we have hacked into some really formidable places (well not me exactly, bt my frnds here... me nt that gud in programming - am better at embedded syetems ), making some real techie bots - like balancer bot, biped runners, stealth explores, etc, just to begin the list ...

and am working with my rock band as well "The StrinGbreaKers" ... expect our first release soon after our end sems...well no ragging here till now, but rest assured theres gonna be a lottt ...!!

And i hav turned my room into a small kind of an arthropodic santuary ... got some 500 species of insects living in harmony with humans and robots... well we r literally in the middle of a jungle .

And theres more, but i got little time ... gotta work with the god damn 8052 ...

will post more very soon, especially on my bots ...
Time signing off ..

HIBERNATION OVER

hi guys,this is my first post
though i've regularly visited the blog i didnt get to post one so sorry about that!!!
i'm at iitkgp now in mech deptt(manfac sc branch)
sabhi hopefully peace(lingo starts here) maar rahen ho.!!!!
at kgp there is quite a bit of load but now peace prevails(midsem naam ka bhoot gaya).....
no ragging here(hoo hoo haa haa)..
regular bhaat ....
and timepass ke liye chem,electrical,maths chalta hai...

the makeover is really cool twish!!

may KVamPYians rule !!
we rock!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

providing a platform ..................since 1988!

its like arun once said, ppl really do have qualms about posting a little post, but hop on while writing massive comments(the list included me till yesterday!).
so at your service, and start typing on about where you are now and in which stream.
we do need to update ourselves!
and i sincerely do hope that the erudite discussions continue..and so do sul and tp posts.

i have got a new topic for discussion........... although it is more sociological and psychological than scientific. survival of the fittest has been a rule for evolution all over the history of earth. but now the mammalian life forms feel a duty to protect its peers, and the peak of culmination of this feeling is the human society as we see it today.
so is the sociey neccesary and if so, why?

first comment about your present whereabouts though.

SUL (Part 1)

How many times have you encountered the language barrier? I have many times. Trying to explain the waiter in Bangalore that I want a glass of water, and he got me a glass of whiskey! This I suppose happens to all those non-polyglots. Isn’t there a way out of this? Why do we not have a universal language?

The Barrier

Try running the Google search with language set to all languages. You will find at least a few thousand Japanese, Korean and Chinese sites. Well you can always run the language filter. But see the amount of information blocked by the language bottleneck. And we still don’t have a good enough translator.

Let English Be

The most obvious question you might ask is why not make English the universal language? Some might even say that English is already the universal language. But I can assure you it is not. Of course half of the world population can understand it. But what about the other half? They might as well accept English provided America conquers the world. But lets finds a more peaceful i.e. a non-American (sorry ;)) solution.

La Universale

What is then the universal language? Let me put forward some points that the ideal language should have. But before that let me tell more about types of languages. Languages are mostly three types.

1^st is Symbolic language. Like English, Spanish, and all European languages. Now don’t ask me why. (Try to pronounce Rough, Cough as bough or Dough.)

2^nd is Phonetic language. Like Hindi, Sanskrit, etc. and I think all other popular Indian languages. This is superior to the one above for a very simple reason that, even any odd sound can be represented in it accurately, and the words are written and pronounced in the same way.

The 3^rd is a very special one and I will come back to it later.

What then is the aim of any language? Simple question isn’t it? To effectively exchange feelings, and of course information. The later is easier than the earlier. Our language or rather the scripts are utter failures in exchanging expressions and feelings and emotions. Think of online chatting. You never know the mood of the other one unless he/she uses ‘smileys’. How crude!

Well not all languages could become universal languages. The best test for a universal language is, if it can be understood and represented WITHOUT prior training in it. Impossible many will say. I say not. I will give one small example. Go to any where in the world and gesture ‘food’ (hand moving to an open mouth). Every one will understand. And such a language should be 100% efficient in expression of feelings. The lack of a script can be adjusted for the time being. So any ideas?

I have one.

You will understand the third type of language very well if you have read the book ‘Eragon’ by Christopher Paolini. It is very close to universalization of communication. What I mean is communication by images (the way Eragon and Saphira communicated). But the most important thing is that the images should not be contaminated by exposure to the outer world. Get it? Telepathy, Brainwave communication, you can call it whatever you like. That will be universal I think. A Bengali, a Marathi, a Spaniard all can of course recognize a cow when they see an image of it, unless of course it is polluted by the ever present human schemata (prejudice in a layman’s language).

The topic is open for discussion, so please join in and hope the 2^nd part comes soon. And before Time signs out let me ask one thing to everyone. (Alsotry to guess what SUL is.) Remember the attempt in 1980s to contact alien life forms in outer space by sending a magnetic disk, with images and sounds of earth (and simple human words in English)? O please don’t laugh. Let me put you in their shoes; tell me what could be the best thing we can send them? See how the lack of a universal language pinches?