Set to Change

Surprise Presentation at Manipal

noreply@blogger.com (Ganesh Kamath) — Fri, 4 Oct 2019 07:59:00 -0700

It has been 6 years since I graduated from Manipal. I studied at the School of Information Science where I did my Masters in Embedded and Wireless Technologies. Suddenly One day I got a call checking my availability for a guest lecture. As I interacted more with the lecturer there, I learnt that I would be addressing Masters students in cloud computing department.

I have been back to college several times after graduation. One time I have even gone back and given a live presentation on USB Device drivers in Linux. But this time it would be different because I was taking my wife along who had not seen Manipal college before.

I asked an intern in my department who used to frequently run his workloads on the cloud, so that he would serve 2 purpose:

As he was an intern from another college, he could relate better with the students
As he had used cloud infrastructure, he could talk about topics more relevant t the students

However, when there was just 2 more weeks for the presentation, I learnt from him that he had an online exam on the day just after the presentation and since his grades depended on it, he would not be able to come with me to Manipal.

Fortunately, by this time we had got the syllabus copy of the cloud computing department which had lot of elements of DevOps and Cloud Infrastructure setup.

I approached a colleague Vijay from my department who had 13 years of experience in DevOps and infrastructure development. He gladly agreed to the opportunity and accompanied me to Manipal.

Our faculty were happy that there was 2 of us coming form the industry to talk to the students.

As roads had been damaged due to rains, our bus reached Manipal at 8:45, instead of 6:10 as booked with the travels. We quickly got ready and reached college around 9:30 and began the presentation.

For the 2 weeks of preparation, we had believed that we would have to share the 3 hours allotted on that day among ourselves. But just before departure, we learnt that each of us were presenting to a different set of students, so we carried separate slides to our sessions.

[Day 1]:

My presentation was to a batch of Embedded System and Automotive Embedded Systems Engineers and my class contained 86 students.

The presentation topics were:

1) How to score more marks
2)     Difference between MNCs and Startups
3)     How to go about a job search
4)     How to be a more effective software professional

In the middle of the presentation, I planned a Notepad++ Macro feature demo. The demo got a good response.

I gave 1 minute gap between topics and then once my slot was over, opened the floor to Q&A. It was a good learning experience. Since Vijay’s time slot was slightly more, I went to the same room as Vijay to hear his presentation.

Both me and Vijay were given mementos for presenting at the college. We collected feedback regarding our presentations and spent some time talking to different lecturers who had taught me.

From the college we went to Pai Tiffin for lunch.

From there we went to Manipal’s Anatomy and Physiology museum. Then we went to the adjacent Manipal canteen to enjoy some waffles in the evening.

When we were about to leave the canteen, a procession of students participating in the Keli fest also arrived at the venue. We joined their procession till Syndicate Bank Golden Jubilee Auditorium. The Keli fest is organized by the Malayali community at Manipal.

It was a good experience to watch students perform all their stage acts, dances, dramas, standups, musicals, beat-boxing, instruments and other performances. The whole fest was filled with lot of energy and we absolutely enjoyed the whole show. We stayed there from 5:30 to 10:30. Then we had dinner at Dollops Restaurant and went back to our Room from there.

[Day 2]:

We got up early in the morning and walked to Manipal Lake. Our stay was arranged in NBQ Valley View flat. The flat had an amazing view from the balcony, where we could see greenery till the horizon among which fog could be seen raising from underneath.

Then we walked around the lake for 2 rounds and walked back to the Hotel.

After having breakfast, there was some time left, so I joined the students playing basketball.

As there was some free time till lunch, I took my wife around Manipal college and showed her around. I took her to the architecture department where we saw different designs of staircases, ramps, balconies and other architectural shapes.

From there I took her to Manipal College Library building, then to the Innovation building. From there I took her to the Chemical Engineering Department where my brother had previously studied. From the Chemical engineering department, I took her to the campus central cafeteria, which has a very appealing design. There used to be a basketball court in front of the cafeteria, but now there is a circular open air theater surrounded by shops on the semicircular periphery.

As we had to take a night bus back to Bangalore, we slept in our hotels in the afternoon.

In the evening we had snacks at the NBQ mess and went to Manipal endpoint. We had an amazing sunset viewing experience at the end point.

Later we gathered all our belongings and walked to Tiger Circle across Kasturba medical College’s entrance. We had dinner at Pangala restaurant and left back to Bangalore.

We hope that the presentation in Manipal has helped the students and Faculty.

Delhi A 5 hour trip from the Airport with my wife

noreply@blogger.com (Ganesh Kamath) — Wed, 7 Nov 2018 04:36:00 -0800

We reached Delhi Airport at 9:30 in the morning. Since our connecting flight via Air India was at 5:40 PM, we decided to go sightseeing from there. Both me and my wife had not been to Delhi earlier. Delhi is the capital of India and upon looking at Google map, we had decided to go to the nearby Aircraft Museum and get back to the Airport.

We took a ticket to Dhaula Kuah from where we agreed to pay an auto driver 130 Rs. to take us to the Museum. Upon reaching however, we found the museum to be closed on Mondays and Tuesdays. So we explained our condition to the auto-driver and asked him to take us to some nearby place instead, as we were desperate to see some part of Delhi that day.

He agreed to take us to Gyara Murthy (11 statues – with Gandhi Leading), Indira Gandhi’s House and India Gate to which we agreed. Upon seeing Gyara Murthy, we were somewhat disappointed because we have that exact same statue right in front of our house in Bangalore. Then we were disappointed even more when we learnt that it was maintenance day on Monday and hence Indira Gandhi’s house was closed as well. On our way to India Gate we enquired if the auto driver could take us to Connaught place, which we had heard from our sister who had been to Delhi with her friends to which the auto driver agreed.

"To the dead of the Indian armies who fell and are honoured in France and Flanders Mesopotamia and Persia East Africa Gallipoli and elsewhere in the near and the far-east and in sacred memory also of those whose names are here recorded and who fell in India or the north-west frontier and during the third Afghan war" - India Gate

Even though he had told us we had 1 hour to spend at India Gate, we could not think of what to do beyond 10 minutes of exploring the place. Then we headed to connaught place which we learnt was just like a shopping place we go to on weekends in Bangalore and quickly checked map again. Our driver then agreed to take us to the Jantar Mantar in Delhi, which is the most beautiful historical structure I had seen on this trip. Jantar Mantar is clean. Near each Instrument, there is a clear description of what the instrument does and what its purpose is in the measurement of time and space. We went from one building to another, and within 30 minutes covered all the monuments located there.

Then we saw Madame Tussauds Wax museum just around the corner in the left. We stopped by the Wax Museum. Upon enquiring at the reception, we learnt that a web booking was 50 percent less than an in cash booking at the counter.

It was my wife’s first trip to a wax museum. I was happy to see her fascinate at the life like images of various Film Stars (Salman Khan, Shah Rukh Khan, Hrithik Roshan, Anil Kapoor, Will Smith, Leonardo De Caprio, Scarlet Johansen, Katrina Kaif, Kareena Kapoor, Sunny Leone, Tom Cruise, Ranbir Kapoor, Raj Kapoor, Amitabh Bachchan, Marylyn Munroe, Shahrukh Khan, Kapil Sharma), Politicians (Gandhi Ji, Narendra Modi Ji, Dr. Abdul Kalam, Bhagat Singh, Subhas Chandra Bose, Vallabhbhai Patel), Sports Person (Sachin Tandulkar, Hussain Bolt, Mary Kom, Kapil Dev, Virat Kohli, Lionel Messi, David Beckham, Milka Singh, Christiano Ronaldo), Singers (Sonu Nigam, Asha Bhosle, Shreya Ghoshal, Justin Bieber, Michael Jackson, Zakir Hussain). The museum also has a kitchen like setting where a lady explains how was replicas are made, giving demo to children to make a replica of their hands.

We felt satisfied having looked at these attractions in Delhi. We stopped by some ancient Hanuman Temple near Shivaji Stadium. We ate Veg Biriyani and Parotha with Paneer Curry near the temple. We visited the temple after placing order. The temple had the dietees, Ram, Lakshman, Sita, Hanuman, Kali, Durga, Shani, Ganesh, Sai Baba, Eashwar, Parvathi, Dattathreya all in the same compound.

From here we departed to the Dhaula Kuan Metro station as agreed with the Auto driver. He agreed for the sum of 1100 as fee for the trip which we were glad to pay. We reached Terminal 3 in the airport at 2:45. Then we walked to the International Departure section which had beds besides waiting area where we rested for 30 minutes. We then ate Beetroot fries which were served at one of the stalls at the airport which cost us 162 Rs. It was nice to try something new at the airport.

We then departed at the scheduled time. Much to our surprise, Air India served us a heavy meal on our flight. Thus we completed a wonderful trip covering places near to the Delhi Airport in about 5 hours, and went back home satisfied with our trip.

Learnings:
In Hindsight, it might seem like we could have avoided wasting time by avoiding going to the places closed on Monday. But we are happy that we met this amazing Auto driver who volunteered to wait for us and ensured we had sufficient time to see each place. He took us around Delhi and empathised with our situation without taking advantage of us in anyway, for which we are truly grateful.

Chandigarh A one day trip with Wife

noreply@blogger.com (Ganesh Kamath) — Wed, 7 Nov 2018 00:48:00 -0800

I had booked 2 tickets to Chandigarh with my wife, to attend a friend’s wedding. Since I had 1 day time to visit the City, we had to pace ourselves and cover all the places in a day. We arrived at the Airport and went straight to the restaurant in the airport compound right across the domestic exit. After breakfast we took a cab to sector 42’s Hotel Amar Palace, a good hotel that was booked via Make my Trip. On our way to the hotel, our cabdriver informed us that, the buildings on either side of the road were painted red because government buildings are painted red in Chandigarh. We passed by the famous Mohali cricket stadium.

Chandigarh has cycle path in addition to the main road which makes it convenient for people to travel form place to place on cycle or cycle-rickshaw.

Chandigarh is a well-planned city planned by Mr. Le Corbusier, whose monuments such as the Open Hand Monuments, Assembly building and secretariats are all located in Sector 1 of Chandigarh.

We took an auto from our hotel and went by the monuments for all of which we were charged 150 Rs, to finally drop us at the Bougainvillea Garden. In the Garden we went to the War Monument which has spirals leading to a centre. The walls of the spiral on either side have the names of soldiers who have lost their lives in various wars. The center of the spiral has a 3D Nib shaped monument which is named Martyr’s Monument. After a leisure stroll across the garden, we went to Leisure Valley. As a tourist, it was nice to learn that the entries to most parks in Chandigarh are free.

Upon crossing Leisure Valley, we walked to the Eiffel Tower Replica that is right next to the Tank Monument. The Tank Monument is also adjacent to a nice little cafeteria which has wonderful butter parathas served at nominal prices. We had breakfast here and entered the Art complex. The Complex has Government Art Museum, Modern Art Gallery, Architecture Museum, Natural History Museum all side by side.

One after another, we saw all these museums. It took us a long time to cover the Government Art Museum because it has different sections each dedicated to a theme such as Ancient Indian Art, Mughal Paintings, Indian Kings Paintings, Buddhist ruins, Japanese Cutlery, Ashoka’s ruins, Indian Mythological depictions. After this we went to Architecture museum which tells us how the city is planned. The museum also tells us how the city came to be the home of refugees of India’s partition story when Punjab needed a new capital. It also tells us the importance of the French rooster displayed in the Sector 17’s market water falls. And also the math behind various Landmarks located in various parts of the city. Also furniture from the past, design of the city’s plan which was printed on the manhole sanitary covers line were displayed in the museum.

From here we went to the Natural History Museum which depicts the Evolution of Earth, Life, Humans and Different realistic dinosaur fossil replicas which were fascinating to look at. The museum also has tools used by early man along with life like Lion and Black Panther at the entry. We went from here to the Modern Arts museum which had pictures and Modern art items made by the students studying there.

After having lunch at the cafeteria, we set out to the Rose Garden. Outside the rose garden we enjoyed a Camel ride. Even though the Rose bushes were prunned, we spotted a rose here and there. The garden has water fountains of various styles and the walk across the garden seemed worth it. We walked from the rose garden to the International Dolls Museum. The Museum is located in a shared compound along with Bal Bhavan and Working Woman’s Hostel. It has dolls from around the world. In the center of the building, there are dolls depicting Ramayana, Mahabharatha, Arabian Nights (Alibaba and the 40 thieves, Alladin), Cinderella, Snow White and similar depictions form Fiction and Mythology.

We then took an auto to Nek Chand’s Rock Garden. The Rock Garden is a garden created from industrial waste. It takes about 3 hours to see everthing in the Rock Garden. It has Artificially created Waterfalls, depiction of nek Chand’s Village, Depiction of a temple, a fort and several Indian Rangoli Designs engrained in the walls, an aquarium, hall of mirrors, meandering wall with Swings having cement horses on the top, a doll house depicting life of rural punjab. It is a cement jungle with cement dolls covered in porcelain shards, bangle shards and shaped differently in different sections. One sections has different animals in groups such as Dogs, cats, deers, horses. Another section has men and women in different postures. Along the path, there is a section where the walls seem to be from thermocol like rock material. There is even an open house theater with a large cinema like screen made of LED which plays a video of the features and history of the place.

After spending time in the Rock Garden, we went to the adjacent Sukna Lake. At the entrance, we ate the Famous Raj Kachori. We then walked along the 3 Km long stroll along the lake that lead us to the Silence Park. As we had walked all day, this walk seemed somewhat straining. As the boating charge there was 300 Rs per head we decided to skip the attraction. Once we reached the Silence park, seeing the Large Buddha seated in the center of the park gave us great joy. The park is shaped like a contour with the Buddha seated in the center of one of the contours. When we reached the park, it was empty and we enjoyed our time there. From there we walked along the Golf course to reach the main road. From there we took an Auto to the Sector 17 Market Place.

The sector 17 Market has a large open square, which a fountain. When we arrived we saw the Musical fountain began. Then we sat along the Waterfalls with the French rooster and reminisced the journey we had that day. After going along window shopping, we had dinner at Hot Millions Restaurant.

From here we took a cycle rickshaw to our hotel which cost us 80 Rs. We then went to bed early as we had to leave to Bangalore early in the morning.

Overall, it was a fantastic trip. We travelled to North India and explored the beautiful city of Chandigarh on our own. Spent a day exploring the city hurrying from one place to another covering all the nearby tourist spots and returned home. From here we took an auto to Chandigarh Airport at 4:45 in the Morning and had a hurried tour of Delhi, which will be covered in the next blog post.

Aditi Hosabettu's House Warming Ceremony

noreply@blogger.com (Ganesh Kamath) — Thu, 28 Apr 2016 08:38:00 -0700

On one April morning in 2016, Aditi Hosabettu personally invited me to her house warming ceremony at Gundmi, a town on the highway connecting Udupi to Mangalore. And so I set out to attend the ceremony along with Anuj Duggal (Yes, the Anuj Duggal from the Inside Out posters and Intel Software Innovator Summit and GDG events).

For the journey we decided to board the bus at Yeshwanthpur KSRTC bus stop which is a 15 minute walk from my home. And since we planned to be on time, we reached my home early, freshened up and roamed around Mahalakshmi Layout which is popular for its wide variety of temples. I have been living in Mahalakshmi Layout for all my life and I had never visited the museum located in the Srinivasa temple, the bus stand where I caught bus every-day. It looked like a good opportunity to take Anuj there and look at the place myself, and so it was (^_^)

That night we boarded the bus as planned and then got engaged in nostalgic conversations till we reached the destination, Shastri Circle (Named after the late Lal Bahadur Shastri).

Aditi had booked a grand hotel room at Sharon Hotel, for our stay where the breakfast was complementary. She also arranged for a car to take us where-ever we wanted and assigned Mr. Ratnakar to take us to the tourist spots nearby. In his demeanor, Mr. Ratnakar was very friendly, jovial and told us the story of Kollur Mookambika and explained the different characteristics of all the places where he took us.

The functions was scheduled on Friday evening and since we had time in the morning, we had time to go to some local tourist spots. And so we went to 4 places namely:

Hatti Angadi (Vinayaka Temple)
Baindoor Beach
Kollur Mookambika Temple
Maravanthe beach

After having taken the blessings from Hatti Angadi, we were surprised to see the Baindoor beach all for ourselves. Me and Anuj were literally the only 2 people at the sea-shore and collected lot of sea shells and coral formations for the memory of the journey.

At Mookambika temple, we got to spend time with the temple elephant that was blessing temple visitors with its huge trunk. It was a treat to see the goddess especially after listening to the stories from Mr. Ratnakar.

From there on, we set out to our hotel, and as we passed by Maravanthe beach, we decided to walk around and lay down at the stone pedestal facing the sea. After a good nap, we both decided to go back to the hotel. Even-though this beach is famous for its mesmerizing road separating the sea from the river, some fly-over construction was going on due to which, we could hardly see the river. Regardless of this, we spent a good afternoon listening to the sea roar.

When we returned back to the hotel, there was still time before the function, so we took rest at our rooms till our cab arrived at the venue.

Upon reaching the ceremonial house (“Parvathi Krupa”), Aditi showed us around her new house, explaining each room with respect to what was to be done in the room and why certain rooms were designed the way they were. We sat out chit-chatting and occasionally talking to some of her family members who were at the event. We left the function after having grand food and arrived at the hotel to take a grand nap.

Next day morning was the auspicious house warming ceremony. Narhar Dev Sharma, one of our Intel colleague joined us at our room and accompanied us for the rest of the day. En route, we decided to go to Aditi’s current house, for which she drove us in her Alto, where we met her mother and cousin Sandeep, who gave us a drop to the celebration house. At their house we saw peacocks roaming around and everyone in the house was busy getting ready for the event.

Upon reaching the new home, we were greeted by Hatwar uncle who welcomed all of us. The celebration included boiling a pot traditionally in the kitchen, till it overflowed. Which was accompanied by several traditional South Indian songs.

Later the family sat in the room where the God was worshiped, and chanted Rama Raksha Stothra followed by Vishnu Sahasra naama followed by beginning verses of Bhagavad Gita. The ritual continued till lunch time where we sat for lunch in the traditional South Indian style sitting along with other invitees and had lunch over banana leaf. By now, we had gotten acquainted with a lot of Aditi’s relatives and felt much welcomed.

Our plan was to visit the Udupi Sri Krishna temple in the evening, so we had checked out from our hotel and brought our luggage to the event. We set out from there at 2:45 and reached Udupi by 3:15. At the temple, we were accompanied by Rashmi and her mother who were big devotees and wanted to have Lord Krishna’s blessings. Later on that day, we went around the temple premise and came upon the spot where Madhwacharya was prophesized to have disappeared.

Having completed all the temple’s in our list we then set out to Malpe Beach, where my mother had asked us to join her. We took the local bus to Malpe beach which seemed to take a long time to reach the venue. After having played in the beach till 6:40, we decided to leave back to Udupi Bus Stand where Rashmi set out to meet her relatives, while I and Anuj decided to go to Mangalore to spend our next day exploring something different.

We enquired for good rooms that were close to the KSRTC Bus Stand in Bejai area of Mangalore. After zeroing down on staying at Hotel Panchami, we went out for lunch and ate Butter Nan for dinner while planning what to do on the next day.

We came to know about “Pilikula Nisargadhama”. It was a nature reserve that had a botanical garden integrated with a zoo. Next to that was a park with an aquarium and a lake which had boating; additionally it had a few more tourist attractions which we decided to skip due to the intense heat. The place had its own restaurant where we found the food to be delicious. The park also had lot of ducks which moved around us on floor as well as while boating. It was especially a treat to see a pair of boys feed ducks with popcorn for the first time and enjoy the experience.

We had heard a lot about Panambur beach and left as soon as we finished going through the zoo. It was at panambur beach that I ate my first Ice-gola and it was really yummy.

We got back to our rooms, packed up all our belongings and then called KSRTC about our change in boarding point. The Conductor was very friendly and pointed us the exact time at which the bus would reach our boarding point. We boarded the bus that brought us back to Bangalore, with lots of memories of fun and joy which we had experienced during our little journey to Kundapur and back.

Instinctive recognition

noreply@blogger.com (Ganesh Kamath) — Wed, 13 Mar 2013 08:36:00 -0700

Instinctive recognition is an abilities that seems to have been come to humans naturally.

We come across thousands of faces in day today life and even though we don’t keep track of all these faces. It is sometimes so surprising that we tend to meet people after having talked to them for once that it is scary. . .

When we come to this world we come with an instinct of recognizing our mother, at least to some extent, and slowly we get familiar with other people like family members and friends. As we grow up we tend to decide to share our lives with a lot more people and the number of people we are familiar with gradually tends to increase over time.

From my bus travels in Bangalore, i have observed that there is a lot of thrill whenever we come across a long lost acquaintance. And even though in some situations it is awkward that we don’t remember their names. Just the feeling of being there again in our memories appeals to our being.

I am particularly baffled in the way we can recognize our friends in a dense crowd.

As human beings we have even implemented technologies like biometric verification by image-recognition, voice-recognition, finger-print, retina-scan and many such technologies.

Even though we tend to forget the names, we expect everyone we have ever met to remember our names and this is perhaps something that has been hard-coded in our nature and needs quite some time to affirm. We need to understand that each persons life is governed by his past priorities, and his life tends to be so much revolving around himself that there sometimes feels no point in just meeting so many other people.

We not only learn about other people by meeting them in person. We tend to learn about a large number of people like movie stars, sports athletes, and people who are involved in politics, religion, philosophy. We even learn about lives about terror-causing, anti-social vigilantes’ who tend to emerge from time to time.

In schools we tend to learn about historically significant figures such as the kings who have ruled our land, the freedom fighters who have fought for our countries. And from media we learn about artificially created characters such as the people living in movies, serials, cartoons, anime, news and so on.

We learn everything in our lives by studying things and people around us. We learn about how people are supposed to react to situations by observing other people. We learn what to talk, and what not to talk in some forums by looking and observing people who have been there and done that. We even set examples for those people who tend to observe us not actively in a role model kind of way but as companions who have been with us when a certain incident happened.

Doesn’t it amaze you the way some people greet you when they meet you the first time with a “Nice to meet you”, or a “Glad to meet you”. If you look at it, there is no reason for him to be glad yet; and i think it is like expressing a state of being that is yet to be in the future, while assuring themselves that you are not a complete waste of their time and resource.

There are games around instinctive recognition that have recently emerged such as "Where is Waldo", in which you have to find the guy with "red-white striped shirt, brown-boots, blue-jeans, snow-cap and a cane" in a densely crowded image.

Yes we are blessed with the gift of instinctive recognition and ignoring those around us whom we don’t recognize. However considering the fact that man is a social being, there needs to be more effort in getting involved with the people around us.

Multicolored Notes

noreply@blogger.com (Ganesh Kamath) — Sun, 3 Mar 2013 08:37:00 -0800

Taking notes in different ink-colored pens is here referred to as multicolored notes. I had a teacher during my pre-university schooling who had mandated the maintenance of multicolored notes for his subject and the format he had specified was:

1) heading in red

2) underlining in black

3) content in blue

Regardless of the importance of the topic, this teacher had mandated the practice. And though I had not seen the importance of this practice, It was not until recently that i tried this art and was fascinated by its several benefits.

To begin with, notes taken in multicolored ink tends to look neat and well documented. It might seem as complete waste of time and resources to some reading this but trust me in several occasions this art is God-sent.

There were several occasions where I had come across classmates who had multicolored pens with them during engineering. Who seemed to be very good at switching the pens even as the teacher went ahead in the topic explanation. I had a practice of bringing just the blue colored pen to the class and for some reason, I lacked the enthusiasm to switch to multicolored note taking.

Recently how-ever when I had to attend a 5 day lecture some of which involved note taking, I got myself pens of color red, black and blue and tried to stick to the 3 rules mentioned above as much as possible, and to my amazement I found that:

1) I was suddenly concentrating a lot on the content, even though the topic was covered post lunch

2) The switching of pens meant that I had to concentrate on the pen switch as well as what was being covered, so there was little scope for boredom ( or the accompanied yawning).

3) There was not only the alertness to keep myself from writing with spelling mistakes, There was now an additional overhead of using the right colored pen for the right context, so i had to be extra aware.

4) I also realized that even though I have one of the less attractive hand-writings (~_^), people around me were amazed at the way I was frequently changing the color of my pen.

Additionally I realized that since I was using 3 pens now instead of one, the pen was likely to last much longer, thus reducing the overhead of me having to get a different pen when the one i had ran out of ink.

I even tried to switch the color of the pen between words in a sentence, where i wrote the normal text in blue while the keywords were in red. At some point, I decided to draw the block diagram with black ink while the text was in black, while the arrows were in red. I have tried several such combinations, like writing the bullets in red, important points surrounded by a black outline, leaving little red stars (*) at important points and so on. But the essence here is, I was adding a lot of context switch and it did not reduce my performance in taking notes, rather improved it.

As children, we are encouraged to recognize alphabets associating them with colored alphabet blocks as toys, but as we grow older, we get used to the bureaucracy and stick to the eye appealing blue colored pens. The problem begins right from schools where we are enforced to write in black pencils and this practice then changed to blue pens as we grow older.

These days the concept of multicolored writing has been adapted in writing computer programs as well, where we see that a text editor is able to color different parts of the code based on key word, indentation or context such as comments or system library derivatives.

Programs are Poems

noreply@blogger.com (Ganesh Kamath) — Tue, 11 Sep 2012 10:44:00 -0700

Programs and poems are two very much similar things. I would say that in a programming language, a well written program is as noble as a poem.

Compiling a poem requires knowledge of grammar underlying a language. This is so even when it comes to programming except that the word grammar is referred to as the syntax of a programming language.

A program is often inspired by details which a common individual seeks. While a poem is the expression of what an individual sees.

Programming is recognized by the format in which it is written. It is a norm for most programming languages to have clear demarcations to indicate purpose such as the use of ‘:’ and “;’ in c, c++,m Java, ...

Today we have innumerable editors what color specific words such as the key words in a specific color so as to give the programmer a better feel of the programming experience.

The loss of a punctuation mark can give a completely un-in-intended meaning in a program as well as a poem.

Yes the advent of internet has had its own impact in both these fields. It has enabled people who are new to a language to do come up with amazing creations. While websites like ‘stackoverflow’ provide snippets required to execute the intention of a programmer, it is known that a good duration of experience can move a real difference between a a well written program, good performing, sensitive program and total chaos.

Wrong choice of words while writing a poem/program can make all the difference in perception. As length of poem/program increases, a user takes longer to comprehend the implications. Since people cant really rely on programming languages to talk to one another, often the programs contain comments. Comments are essential to clarify the intentions with which the coding was done and thus serve to help optimize itself. Certain parts of the program can be progressively replaced by computationally efficient and syntactically convenient alibi. Like programmers have a choice of logic, poets too have a choice of conveyance.

Just as a person can be trained to program, so can be done in terms of poems. How ever not everyone turns up a work of art.

It takes attitude, innovation and passion to excel at programming. The right choice of code for a particular purpose can drastically reduce the effort in completing a project. And also reduce the effort later spent in debugging it (^_~). Good programs get appreciations and awards once in a blue moon, because Programming has been looked at in a totally different perspective as of today.

We see that great works like Shakespear’s getting a lot of recognition, however the same attitude is not seen towards programming giants. A well written program has the effect of mesmerizing an onlooker like the “list comprehension” in python.

Yes most of us aspire to write great programs but because of lack of right guidance at the right time, we see cases, where an attempt to write a brilliant poetry ends up in as a messy paragraph not standing out as a status of a poem.

In most languages, a good rhyming sentence is considered an appreciable poem. In programming, a well indented code is similarly said to be appreciable written program. The change in scenario is quite noticeable because, poems are meant to be read out loud, while that’s not the case of a programming language. A fresh mind and adequate concentration is required to write a poem/program.

One might argue that poems generally tend to carry a deep sense of emotions, this is not something we seen in a program and this difference comes from the fact that programming languages cannot be used between people to abuse each other or show love one has for another in strict linguistic sense. At best one can write a program for emotion recognition and write appropriate functions to handle the circumstance.

Programs are written for a machine to understand what humans tend to convey. Even thought the program tends to convey the requirements, there are glitches and performance penalties when time of execution is not considered in many cases. Such too is the case when it comes to poetry. A person reciting a poem is generally expected to recite it in a more or less agreeable tone to have the full impact of the poem under recital.

Programs have evolved only recently in the history of our species. Yet we have developed different styles and types of languages, in which we express and convey the desired results, from the rate at which computer programs are evolving, it can be said that the programs are here to stay and inspire generations of programmers yet to come.

Chairs in our lives

noreply@blogger.com (Ganesh Kamath) — Mon, 27 Aug 2012 09:38:00 -0700

Chairs in our lives
We all have chairs at our homes. Chairs serve as a tool to sit in a comfortable and socially acceptable manner.

Even as you are reading this post, it is likely that you are sitting on a chair while doing so. There are several other alternatives for sitting but it is most common to sit on a chair, atleast in public. Chairs have influenced a lot of changes and development, for instance, if cars didn’t have chairs, it wouldn’t have gotten so popular.

Rich people spend a lot on chairs. Almost everyone wishes to display grand chairs for guest at home by spending heavily on furniture associated with a chair such as a coffee table, a stool, a vase stand.

Some of the most common appearances of chairs can be sofa chair, rocking chair, wheel chair, bean chair, chair with wheels like the ones used in office, chair in the dining room, chair in a park, chair in a bus, commodes are chair shaped toilets (~_^).

If you think about it, childern’s parks showcase several variations of chairs. Like the sitting facility on see-saw, slide, swing... etc.

Chairs help us overcome the force of gravity by providing surfaces to dissipate the force from our bodies on to the surface of the chair. Chairs provide support to the back and act as means to maintain one position for a long time.

The letter ‘h’ in a chair looks like a chair (^_^), just like the word ‘bed’ which looks like a bed.

Chairs have been icon of power and luxury all through the ages. The emperors throne, the presidents seat, heir to the throne are common terms of use. Chairman is a term given to a person who is a deciding committee member.

Electric chairs were used to kill death sentenced prisoners soon after its invention.

At parties, there is a famous game called musical chair, in which people get eliminated if they are not able to acquire a seat fast enough. This game is an event based game where the event is indicated by start and stop of a certain music being played. Musical chair also significance of how you can get eliminated if you are not able to react to a certain situation well in time.

Chairs clearly define boundaries between you and the person next to you.

While sitting on a chair, the body is no longer required to concentrate on balance that is required while a person is standing. As humans, we tend to stand and walk seamlessly, but try to get the same from a dog and you will see my point. Yes the center of gravity itself is shifted while sitting (^_~).

The number of legs on a chair depends on its purpose, as in the case of a car seat where it has one support, in park seats it has 2 supports and in a table chair, it generally has 4 but the number really depends more or less on choice. Chairs have influenced the way we live and here is a video that summarizes it all.

I make pi look rational

noreply@blogger.com (Ganesh Kamath) — Fri, 1 Jun 2012 07:12:00 -0700

I make pi look rational!

Finding a pattern in the word pi has been one of man’s most unsuccessful ventures. The accuracy of representing pi has been one of mans greatest struggle in his wish to express his views in the mathematical world that we live in. Pi is an irrational number, which we in our schools substitute by the number 22/7 but in reality it is not a rational number, i am sure most of you know that and it is a constant that one gets by dividing the circumference of a circle by its diameter (pi = 2*pi*r/(2*r)). Yes you can try this with a piece of string and let me know what turns up.

This was my Gmail status for some time... and people kept asking me what it meant and why nothing was turning up in Google search when they looked it up.

The fact is I just thought it up and put it up as my status. People who know me will definitely mention somewhere or the other that I am irrational. May be I am, may be I am not... however, I have come across many situations where I found myself thinking about circumstances differently.

I am fascinated by shortcuts. Whenever someone shows me that there is an easier way of doing things, I try to learn it as quick as possible so that there is lot of time to do other things. For example I found that while solving DSP assignment, it took tremendously less time if I sat and did it all at once, instead of doing say 2 problems each day. This was because most of the problems had repetitions in many calculations.

There have been occasions when my teachers have asked me to shut up whenever I asked some doubt because the teacher failed to see the problem in my way. This has not however deterred me. In maths especially, in my 7^th standard my teacher got annoyed that I was giving away the solutions to problems on simultaneous linear equations before the whole question was completed, and made sure that I gave away answers only after I had written down each and every step that led to the solutions.

I have had big dreams, have had my share of expectations from life. But somehow it always seems that i was surrounded by people who kept telling me that things in life are very difficult. If you ask me, I will say that i have not seen anything so absurd, its as if life runs on autopilot, as long as you perform your share of responsibilities.

Not just that, i have been fascinated by how a coin rolls over and finally decides to lie on one of its sides. I am fascinated by what caused water to turn like a whirlpool, at my home sink. I am sure one of you is going to paste links to convince me that there are theories behind all this yes, i have already looked up a few of them.

I would like to quote ,“don’t let the small minds around you fool you into believing that your goals are too big to reach”, I dont know who said this, but think about the countless occasions where we have taken a lesser path just because someone told you that the other path was too difficult.

Why compare myself to pi?

I would say don’t, because this is just an analogy of what the world looks at you and thinks about you after having their share of experiences to judge you. Yes pi is definitely irrational, and may be i am also irrational, that does not mean that you start comparing.

Each thought has a special place in a person’s life. We define what we term as rational and what we don’t. Yes sometimes i irritate others in my class by asking too many doubts. I regret to inform you that i too would have felt the same way if i was in your place, but the truth is that i am not.

I am different, i cant keep some doubts just rambling up there in my head as the lecture in class goes on. There is a tremendous sense of satisfactions every time my teachers attempt to solve my doubts and I have got to say that they are getting a very good hang of it (^_~).

There is a very old movie named “Pi” some of you reading this might have seen the movie. It is about about the life of a genius who gets to know the secrets of pi, how ever the technology has moved much beyond just an IC and today we have technology that make it hard for us to believe how life was back then.

March 14^th, which happens to be my friend ashwin’s birthday, is internationally “pi day 3:14”, lol, but it's also Albert Einstein's birthday (^_^). Yes i have used Pi’s fame to attract audience to my blog and i wish to owe all this credit to pi, thank you.

Is truth an opinion?

noreply@blogger.com (Ganesh Kamath) — Sun, 11 Mar 2012 10:07:00 -0700

Is truth just an opinion?

You might know the story of the 5 blind men and the elephant, where each person tells what he observed to the other and it turns out that they all are wrong in reality.

We come across several incidents in day to day life, and while we have our point of view, truth happens to underly reality. To be more clear, just as the saying goes, beauty lies in the eyes of the beholder, truth too has a framework of its own. Each person observes different things in his life, and it is the occurrence of this duality that makes us question truth.

So lets try to look at a link connecting opinion and truth.

We say seeing is believing. But in reality, truth tends to have its own limitations. This is exactly where religion fails. Each religion preaches some beliefs depending on the person who initially perceived it with his 5 senses. But when attempted to put the different views from different people together, we turn up with something that we turn up in the story of the “5 blind men and the elephant”, the resulting entity is nothing close to an elephant.

Sometimes truth changes over time. For example, the flat model of the earth and the theories like the geocentric theories have prevailed in society we had mathematically consistent models of motion and time. It took a change in mindset to accept that the earth is indeed round and of course the heliocentric theory and now we have bent the math around what we now believe as the truth.

How truth is different from belief:

Most of us believe whatever we know as the truth. This kind of a mechanism helps us survive as individuals, because, if we really had to find out the truth all by ourselves, there would not be any time for the more important things in our lives.

For instance we believe our parents that they really are our parents. We believe that our name is so and so and continue with that. We believe that the world was here before we were born and will continue after we are gone

When a teacher says things like electricity and magnetism, we believe our teachers, even though none of these phenomenon have been completely understood. We believe in mathematics and things like elementary particles and string theory even tough in reality we don’t have contemporary analogies. For that reason, we tend to rely on analogies more than reality while understanding the mechanism of most phenomenon (misuse of vocabulary).

As children we are taught to speak the truth and from experience we learn that good morals are indeed a pre-requisite for a good way of life. However some situations lead us to question the fundamental principles and when we don’t find answers to such situations, we tend to come up with our own ideas on what might have happened. At his point we see that truth can be made up just as easily as an opinion.

This is it true that truth is just an opinion?

No. Like most human behaviour, truth too is assimilated with a negative feedback attitude. We perform different experiments in real life which tells us how to react to different situations we come across, as we learn we label different things as true depending on reliability of the argument. Whereas opinion is just what we think at one specific moment in our lives. In a broader sense, opinions are the way we reach the truth or what we tend to conclude as the truth.

Does it really matter?

No. Like I initially argued, it does not matter, because whatever happens in reality we each find explanations and try to move on. We are so good at modeling things with mathematics that when we find mathematics showing results on extrapolation, we tend to come up with realities based on our observations; take string theory, chaos theory, extra dimensions for instance, where mathematics expalins everything perfectly but we are limited by our sense.

It is a common opinion that proverbs are universally applicable. However there are several proverbs which contradict each other! this clearly helps us to distinguish beliefs, opinion, truth and fact.

Do Exams Matter

noreply@blogger.com (Ganesh Kamath) — Wed, 15 Feb 2012 08:42:00 -0800

Do Exams Matter?

I am going to start with a Yes for the time being, and as the page turns, different ideas will be discussed. The exam mentioned here refers to academic exams.

Yes, exams do matter for a number of reasons. As far as education system is concerned, to be consistent with the rest of the class, exams are conducted with a common syllabus in mind to check if a student has grasped the essential contents of the subject.

An exam helps a student make a self estimate of his knowledge in the subject. It gives a student a goal, without which he might as well spend his time reading random stuff for knowledge. It helps teachers analyze their teachings in class, and make appropriate changes in their future lectures and standard mark with which academics can be measured.

However, exams only represent the on spot knowledge presented by a student in an exam hall, and not the over-all knowledge of the student itself. Most content that appears in an exam has to be covered in the class and exams should not contain out of the blue seeming topics (which is unfortunately, these days a quite common practice in most engineering colleges). Students must be challenged based on what is taught, and not on what the lecturer considers difficult to understand. It is also fundamentally wrong to expect every student to be a copy of Albert Einstein!!!

Though the fear of failure is a motivational drive for last minute studying students, it forms a definite goal for students who aim at topping the subject, because, in order to top an exam, the student tries to cover the entire syllabus well before the exam and this aspect alone can be the drive to gain more knowledge.

Scholarships and fee reduction for academically excelling students’ forms another motivational aspect while studying a particular subject.

How much do exam matter?

The answer to this question is purely dependent on an individual and depends on the scenario, on the individual’s motives and priorities in life. Additionally it also depends on an individual’s life experiences so this matter will not be addressed directly.

Before: an exam, it is the duty of the individual to make sure that he knows why he is writing an exam and has to know the syllabus of the exam. Make sure you study with an attitude of learning all that is recommended and aim for the top place.

During: an exam it is in the best interest of the student to be equipped with knowledge as well as accessories required for the exam. Punctuality for examination and carrying a wrist watch is recommended to make sure that the best use of the allotted time is made. For good recollection during an exam, a student has to make sure that he has reserved some time for a last minute revision just before the exam. And maintained all the required content of the exam in a well accessible format.

After: an exam the general tendency is to expect a very good result, regardless of the performance. However, ideally, it is best to get rid of all expectations and move on with another activity till the results arrive.

Effects of exam stress:

Exam stress can have several effects such as sleep deprival, nightmares, tension, under-esteem, lack of confidence, lack of concentration, poor recollection and other health issues.

Why are exams feared so much?

As children, parents tend to judge students based on their marks, and tend to compare with other children of that age or with a sibling. This is a very wrong practice and affects the students way of thinking as a whole.

Though failure at an exam is on top of the list of fears, the real fear of exam arises due to lack of effective preparation for the corresponding exam.

And the worst part is that the results of an exam is feared more than the exam itself.

Experience:

During school, i have never been forced to study, and neither had i done very well in academics, I used to talk a lot and get punished regularly and did not know the importance of education. How ever much much later i began performing well and found out that if your grades are good enough, the other person usually gets the blame of talking. So I advice study you to study well, there are several little benefits apart from the major ones like job selections and scholarships and gold medals.

My advice:

Prepare well when you have time, because no one knows how tomorrow is going to be. It is better to start sharpening the sword during peace, rather than after a battle has begun, as an old story says.

Why Resistance halfens in parallel

noreply@blogger.com (Ganesh Kamath) — Sun, 5 Feb 2012 05:19:00 -0800

Why Resistance halfens in parallel

A resistor offers resistance offers resistance to current. I have used the parallel resistance formula to solve an enormous number of problems in my B.E course on Electronics and Communication. However this question did not strike me back then; If a resistor offers a resistance R then why do 2 resistors in parallel offer lesser resistance? This question did not appeal to us probably because in most courses, resistors are learnt after capacitors and while learning, the teacher says that the two formulas (Resistors in series and capacitors in parallel) are similar and we buy it, and start applying it.

I was sitting in Udupi bus-stand waiting for my bus to Bangalore when this question struck me and it took some time for me to get the answers that night. I first tried approaching the problem in terms of the material used for the resistors, which according to me were both the same so it would not generally matter.

We learn in electronics that a voltage source appears to behave like a tank of water maintained at some potential. The resistors in this case act like a pipe, whose diameter restricts the flow of water from the pipe to the ground. So if 2 pipes are connected in parallel, then each pipe would still continue to offer the same resistance to the flow of water but would convey twice the amount of water to the other end. This realization was the key in understanding how resistors also appear to offer only half the amount of resistance to current in an electrical circuit. This can also be thought of as the cases where the two pipes are replaced by one thicker pipe to offers an equallent reduction in resistance.

In the case of Series circuits, however, the pipe would now be twice as long and the distance the water needs to flow doubles and hence the resistance offered by the effective pipe-chain, is twice as much. Hence resistors in series offer double the resistance.

This basic principle can be extended to any number of pipes in series or parallel and hence in resistors as well.

When I discussed this with my friend Ashish in Bangalore, he gave me his own point of view which was that each resistor continued to send the same amount of current across the circuit and hence the doubling of current meant a halfening of resistor value.

We can also look at the problem like a road. If there are parallel roads or one road with several lanes then the traffic can move faster and hence offers less resistance to movement. And if there is just one lane, then the traffic will be clogged and acts as series resistance.

To conclude, the behavior of resistors, pipes, traffic can be analyzed on similar grounds and it is important to know the significance, even though we can manage most situations in life continuing to be ignorant.

Note: We find a similar behavior in all places where networks are involved, such as human body circulatory system, water supply channels, road networks, truss networks, electrical networks, spider web, internet, structure of birds nest, etc. How ever I don't think it is necessary to discuss any of them in detail in this post.

Significance of time

noreply@blogger.com (Ganesh Kamath) — Sat, 21 Jan 2012 21:00:00 -0800

Significance of time

Time is one of the most influencing factors in a person’s life. When a man is depressed, all he wishes is some time (/away) from his dear ones. I remember a message on the importance of time.

The guy had to repeat an year in education knows the importance of 1Year
The guy who is about to write an exam in one hour knows the importance of 1 hours.
The guy writing the exam knows the importance of 1 minute.
The guy who just missed an accident knows the importance of 1 second.

We are perhaps the only beings that know what time is, we have analyzed time and derived some important conclusions, some of which are, "Time waits for no one", time lost cannot be regained. “Time and tide wait for none”. Some believe time is money, while to be a teacher, while there are others who believe that time is God.

Time is measured in millennia, century, decade, year, month, week, day, hour, minute, second, millisecond depending on what it stands to represent. Measuring time accurately has been one of the most challenging tasks ventured by mankind, despite the common belief that time is eternal.

Being on time. Completing a work in time. These two sentences clearly let us know the significance of time as a guiding mechanism.

We are more interested on how much time is remaining when we are transferring a file to another device from our computer or downloading a file from the internet.

People spend a lot of money just to save time. When a work is given to an employee, his salary indirectly reflects the amount of time he has saved to the company.

People take appointments to meet each other, especially medical specialist (doctors, surgeons, dentists). When people decide to meet after a long time, they fix on a time and a place.

We all live by 2 internationally followed time references

1) The B. C. (the birth of Christ)

2) The Greenwich meridian (for global time synchronization)

People tend to quote “Those were some of the best times” or say: “those were the days” when they refer to their past.

Past, present and future are separations made by time.

Make good use of whatever time you get. Yes we tend to say that we are bored during nothing, It is not a bad idea to join a training course during the holidays if you know what training course is apt for you.

Students need to make good use of the available time during the day. It is very important to make sure you get enough sleep because health can degrade over time if sufficient sleep is not provided to the human body.

Fruits and vegetables rot over time. Animals become extinct over time and new species evolve. Time governs motion, heat dissipation, luminosity, diffusion of fragrance and colour. Glaciers melt and continents move over time. But what puzzles me the most about time is how, everything happens simultaneously in the universe. How ever mysteriously, subject syllabus varies very less (I have studied the same thing in engineering which my uncle once had (^_^) ).

Worship your time and respect others’ time.

Timing is very important for a joke to be successful. It is very important to make the right strategic move at the right time in a game of chess; or cricket for that matter. Well-timed scenes from movies win the hearts of millions, and can make the difference between a flop and a hit.

When it comes to business, it is very important to make decisions as to when a product is to be released and when an ad needs to appear on television to get a good customer response.

Causality dictates that the current state of the universe has been reached because of the series of events over time since the big bang. This might seem to explain everything; however there is more a role of chaos and uncertainty that makes it unjustifiable to make accurate predictions about future events.

Accurate Time measurements have been a very big goal in the past, where sun-dials, position of sun, moon, stars and observation of surroundings and animal behaviour patterns were relied upon to come to a conclusion about time. However it was not until the quartz clock and the Modern GPS that time accuracy could be standardized and verified worldwide.

Time is also a great conversations starting topic. When I have to chat to some unknown person on facebook, I start with a “what time is it over there?” Even in situations where you need to talk to some unknown person like say in a Bus you can use time as an excuse. And phrasing the question right can again help you have a wonderful conversation- ask a person “what is time?” (Purposefully leaving out the “the”) and you’ll either end up getting corrected or you’ll have a wonderful insight into the spiritual perspective of time! :P

It is a very common opinion that we are slaves of time. We tend to follow certain routine in our day to day lives to which we get acquainted to and find it hard to give up. For a person who gets up at 6 in the morning from a very early age it is difficult to suddenly adjust to getting up at 8 it might as well be the other way round. Eating, sleeping habits tend to form around time. The notion of being slaves to times probably comes from the fact that wrist watches somewhat look like chain armlets.

Time is a reality. Time is relative. Time is retrospective. Time is round. Ha ha ha ha, this is what time can do when you put your mind to something.

There are several movies which are centred on time. “The time machine” tells us how events are related in time. “The Curious Case of Benjamin Buttons” tells a lot about time however this article is not the right place to discuss it. However to mention a few:

1) The commemoration of the veterans with the reversed clock

2) The reverse ageing of Benjamin Buttons

3) The sequence of events that happen right on time leading to the accident

Time is often learnt referring to calendars and wrist watches these two are now accessible in mobile phones which may eventually lead to their extinctions.

Time has been the fascination of several leagues of mathematicians and scientists. It was in fact the accurate prediction of one of the results of solar eclipse, which first introduced Albert Einstein to the world. Time is one of the best teachers. Time teaches us that there is limit to everything achievable because our time itself is limited.

Many organizations and institutions have a time-tables and deadlines to ensure that a certain objective can be reached within a certain amount of time.

Different civilizations have had different units of measuring time. For instance, several civilizations had the 365 day cycle in an year. In India the Panchanga is a book that not only serves as a calender but also stands reference to astrological predictions. The Sun-dial, the hour-glass are some of the other famous time measurement inventions.

I have already spoken enough about time machines in my post "Eccentric's view into the reality of the time machine". However time has its own rules and don't be detered when something goes wrong in life. Take your own time in making decisions and make sure you get the best out of your time on earth.

Time in my life:

I have spent 4 hours of every day travelling between college and home in Bangalore during my engineering days. Though it might look insignificant, (24 – 8 (sleep) – 8.5 (college hours {8 – 4:30}) – 4 (travel) – 1.5 (morning to get ready) – 1 (relax from the travel)) which left me with 1 hour to myself at the end of the day, and my mom used to wonder why I was scoring average marks in during my Engineering life.

Sometimes all it takes is just a little more of time and effort to achieve what we want, while sometimes its just a waste of time. - Ganesh Kamath

Time matters a lot. The Round Trip Time is a measure of bandwidth and congestion in a computer network. Turn Around Time and Waiting Time are measures of performance of Operating Systems. Time to live decides the life time of a packet. Time to Market a product also matters a lot in industry and can make a difference of profit and loss.

Most Fairy tales begin with "Long ago in a distant land", Star Wars begins with "A Long ago, in a galaxy far, far away..."

There was a time when i wondered, 'What if the time of the universe runs out one day', but then there was no one to discuss this with and I present this to you today.

In South Canara, if you ask some one the distance between two places, they tell you the time instead. This is because, the highways here have very less traffic and they know that vehicles generally take the same time over a period, regardless of influencing factors. However, the same cannot be said about Bangalore.

When it comes to making a new World Record, it is usually a matter of milliseconds when it comes to Olympic records. However almost all records have a time factor.

fox and the grapes conundrum

noreply@blogger.com (Ganesh Kamath) — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 05:57:00 -0800

Fox and the Grapes Conundrum:

“Fox and the grapes” is one of Aesop’s most famous fables. Almost all of us learn the story of the fox which goes something like, “One day a fox came across a wine of grape on its path, it tried its best to reach the bunch of grapes handing from the tree that was covered by the wines, after several tries the fox goes away comforting itself saying that the grapes are sour”. I read from Wikipedia that this principle is known as Cognitive Desonance, whereby, you decide to give some explanation in situations which are unfavourable or unexpected by you.

We must however appreciate the underlying the idea behind this story, that we tend to be the fox from the story. In fact we lead our entire lives hanging to the underlying principles portrayed in this story.

For instance, say you have gone out on a wonderful day to buy yourself a shirt, probably for your birthday (^_^). And you see 2 shirts in a shop both of which look very nice, however you have just enough money for one. In situations like, we see a case of cognitive desonance, we somehow logically conclude that one of the two shirts are better and buy it. And on asking why can come up with flaws that might not actually be there.

This kind of logic is built into the human system of thinking. We decide things spontaneously and expect everything to go fine. We are programmed to carry on, when there is situations like this.

There are several illustrations which one might have already experienced. For instance, in the game Super Mario, we have to spontaneously choose between where to go next when we enter the pipe at level 2. Where a user can go to level 3, 4, 5 next. In the game it is seen that people often differ in opinion when they are overcome by such a situation.

When asked to comment about a beautiful picture. It is found that different people observe different things about a picture. Like the saying goes, “Beauty lies in the eyes of the beholder”. Every individual is unique and thinks differently. However the sees only what it wants to see so be sure you have exploited all options before concluding anything prematurely.

Though we tend to listen to the story of the fox and the grape. We realize its relevance only if we look back at our actions in day today life. This is one of the most consequential stories we tend to live by. For imagine if the fox kept going on and on, then nothing would have changed in its life.

While “Try and try until you succeed” stands to motivate the people who fail in some of their first few attempts. We are humans and we have limitations. It is possible to overcome some of them. However not everything has a true solution. Sometimes it is better to let things go, than to keep going on. “Most things need not be impossible, however, several things are illogical” - Ganesh Kamath.

At first we might not accept that we are like the fox because most tales from fables portray the fox as a cunning creature (probably including this one). However if you try to relate to the things that you desire as the grapes you will seen see what I mean here.

Learn from this story!!! Let go and keep moving forward. You might have seen a basketball player dunk. Where by the ring is over 9 feet high and might have tried doing it yourself. You might have even succeeded and might say that efforts bear fruits. Well look at it this way, instead of 9 feet if it was 9000 feet high, then the basket would not even be visible let alone you going for the dunk. Yes life is (a bitch) full of disappointment. But there are far better things to do than to think over and over about problems like these. When one door closes in our life we keep looking at the closed door for so long that we don't take the opportunity to venture other doors deterred by disappointment.

You might think of attacking this problem by reverse engineering the problem. Where in you can say that the wolf was stealthy enough to climb the tree and somehow managed to get the grape. Well we are looking at a different situation altogether now. For all you know, fox don’t eat grapes (^_~). There are several results we can derive if we look at the problem backwards...

I have seen the reverse engineered application of this problem first hand. For example, when you order a “Sev puri” and a friend comes close enough to take one of the “puri” from you, if you say that the “puri” is not good. He won’t take it from you. This is negative advertising and another defence mechanism which exists in the nature of human beings.

As human beings it is in our nature to make assumptions and conclusions, however, always keep it in mind that Wrong assumptions lead to wrong conclusions and the consequences can be severe in many real life situations.

P.S. : Those of you who have not yet referred to the word Conundrum, it means confusion in this context.

My work experience at E Surveying Solutions

noreply@blogger.com (Ganesh Kamath) — Sun, 8 Jan 2012 01:42:00 -0800

My work experience at E Surveying Solutions

I have worked in E Surveying Solutions in almost all of my Engineering vacations. It is a company my Uncle (Mother’s youngest brother), Mr. Kotaa Krishna Kamath (aka KKK) started after his previous work at Relyon Softech as Director, Founder and developer. I have done some small assignments at Relyon Softech such as setting up Interview Question Paper, Correcting Interview Answer sheets, reporting bugs in Saral Paypack and merging PDF documents of state-wise school surveys using PDFmerge. Though these assignments are very simple to complete, I was in first PUC when I did it (first PU is similar to 11^th standard). Also I had no knowledge of any of these products. It was however notable that nobody qualified the aptitude paper that I set and they decided to revert to the old paper set after testing my paper for one day.

In the starting days of the company, when i first approached him, I wished to know a little about the work and help him in whatever way that I could. He showed me what I was supposed to do and was happy with whatever part I did.

My uncle is a Mechanical Engineer, who started a company that makes Softwares for Civil Drawing generation. The first thing one can notice about this is that, it’s a cross disciplinary company that is a combination of Mechanical, Computer Science and Civil Engineering, and I being an Electronics and Communication Engineer learnt a few basic works at the company.

My first assignment was to collect a list of Surveyors for his company to sell products to. The company makes Civil Software for Surveyors that will generate drawings in 2D and 3D for data collected from Ground Works, Drainage Channels, Road Elevation Data, Irrigation Canals, etc.

During the first assignment, I used to sit all day long making list of Surveyor’s all across the country. This work was important because, there is no list readily available online. It was my first experience with Microsoft Excel and though it began to feel monotonous, it left me with a good experience with the software. Also, when this work was first done, his office had just one computer so I had to go to a Browsing Centre to make the list. The next assignment was to make Crossword Puzzle that contained words to be organized into puzzle. As it turns out, It is so much easier to set a crossword puzzle than to solve them (^_^). I was also required to collect comics that contained survey jokes for a magazine Idea that he had in mind.

The next time when I went to ESS, I was given assignments which I could do at home, I was expected to find 30 bugs in his software, and after I did so, I had the rest of the day for myself, most often, I used to sit on an assignment about an hour before I had to go the office find the bugs and report the bugs to him. I approached him late during my next holidays, so that was the only assignment that I did.

The bugs were reported as in standard testing format where Path to the window type of bug and a brief description of the nature of the bug were meant to be sent. The bugs were mostly of the Font type, tab-order reversal, alignment of various entities in a window, and the order in which the softwares gave the Run Time Error.

Additionally the customers using this software were very fond of Key-board shortcuts so we began adding shortcut features to all the entities in the software. Later on we finalized with a common format for all shortcut display. My part was only to check if all the keys and tabs had a unique shortcut.

However, in my next holidays when i approached him, he showed me how I could test his softwares thoroughly. I learnt a little of Black Box testing. His product E Survey Sections was becoming a very good success in Survey industry. He was still running the company all by himself. He took me to 2 places where he did his marketing. It was fun to see how varied his customers and their offices were. Additionally it was discovered that different resolutions, themes and other default settings also affected the working of the software, and new test cases were added as an when new challenges were encountered in testing.

The company makes softwares which can be run independently on their own, but when the software is combined with the output of Excel and CAD, and the kind of people who have working knowledge in them have limitless uses for his softwares because While drawings can be accurately drawn in CAD, the data tabulation and analysis features given by Excel, run hand in hand and make the biggest of difficulties look simple and help in automation of work.

The next holidays when I got there, I did a thorough black box testing of his various softwares, now there were different softwares to deal with specific requirements from customers. E Survey CAD, E Survey Lisps, E Quick Sections, E Topodraw were some of them. It was about time that the testing procedures were standardized and we began noting down some instances of test cases that needed to be done on each product from there on. It was at the end of this holidays that new employees like Praveen, Shashank, Hamsa had joined the Company. Just before I left for the next semester college, my last assignment was to teach them how to test softwares and I kind of gave them an overview of all the products. Another assignment which I remember doing at that time was a report on GPS and various historical advancements that could make a good use of the GPS facility.

This was particularly needed because survey was looking for various benefits from GPS and the Total Station Land Navigation Equipment which was needed for the survey was often with errors. The softwares developed from company could generate the required drawings directly from the Total Station Data.

The next holidays when I got there, I was required to learn basics of CAD. So we started going to Kruthi Centre for learning CAD as part of the training. I had basic knowledge of AutoCAD until then, but I learnt so much more at Kruthi about 2D, 3D drafting and the newly introduced features of AutoCAD such as export of tables to Excel directly from AutoCAD. I even got to learn AutoDesk Inventor software. The best part however was that the Training was fun, interesting, the company paid for it and I had to work only half a day during training. It was also the time when I learnt how to make video tutorials using SnagIT software, so I made videos of AutoCAD of the training that we had been to, so that employees could learn from the videos instead. In most cases, the person using the softwares was required to use Notepad ++, Excel, AutoCAD so in short, I have learnt a lot of these softwares. The company had made an irrigation project called Ayacut and had released a special software by the name Ayacut to deal with various parameters in designing Irrigation channels.

In the next holidays my uncle began with teaching me Visual Basics, it is a fun to learn programming language, however, seems like I neglected it a bit while I had the chance and went back to testing the softwares after the first assignment on VB. If you ask me, he is the only person who can teach VB in that fashion. Learning VB also helped me report bugs more accurately, because I now knew the different window components such as tabs, menu-bars, panes, textboxes, buttons, radio buttons, checkboxes, dropdown menus and many more. I wrote a code that did the same as Microsoft Calculator using VB.

By this time, the customers of ESS had begun to ask for help files. And documentation of all the products began. At first the theory behind the working of various theorems. One particular assignment I had done under this was Simpson’s one third rule of integration. This was so because the next semester we had Simpson’s Rules in our syllabus. Documentation helped me learn a lot about text formatting and indentation along with table and picture manipulation under Microsoft Word.

The next holidays when I got there, I learnt that the company had now over 26 products in the market (which included E Survey CAD, E TopoDraw, E Contours, E Survey Lisp, Ayacut, E EarthWorks, Crispy Lisp, E Survey Section, Survey Aid )(I particularly had fun with E Contours, having learnt CAD I had a knowledge of how I could manipulate a drawing), each tailor-made for specific requirements. In this Holiday, however, I was required to make AutoCAD ribbons, Since Customization was part of the CAD training at Kruthi, I knew where to begin this assignment, however I only managed to make rough ribbon outlook that did nothing when buttons were pressed. I thought it needed some kind of ‘Lisp’ knowledge and began looking for solutions in Lisp, unfortunately this was not so, however, in my quest, i learnt about different versions of AutoCAD such as AutoCAD 14 and all succeeding versions of AutoCAD and learnt how each version varied from the next. One of the Assignments during these holidays was to analyze Bazier splines (Bazier Smooth Polylines) and to check out how they weighed against AutoCAD’s spline feature. Shashidhar had just joined the company and he was a programmer. I was required to explain to him how the spline Equation worked and he was required to program it. This was the first time I learnt Maths online (^_~). It is amazing how splines can approximate to real world curves.

Additionally Delaunay’s Triangulation was a part of the next assignment and it was fun to study it. This triangulation was needed for AutoCAD to generate drawings quickly and efficiently by reducing the overhead in calculating the easiest way to draw in a drawing with several thousands of points.

Lisp is a very easy to learn programming language, though lisp is mostly used for CAD purposes (because it was designed that way) today Lisp serves several applications.

I also learnt additional CAD softwares such as GStarCAD, ZWCAD and BricsCAD. The Lisp Script needed to be tested in these softwares for consistency and it was essential that all these softwares responded for the various Lisps.

In my last and final holidays of engineering, when I first got there, I was required to find Google Earth API for finding the Z co-ordinate of a point at any point on earth, given the X, Y coordinates. I learnt a few special features that were present in Google Earth while on this assignment. It was something totally different from all my previous assignments and fun in its own way. After this assignment was done, I tested E SurveyLisps, E SurveyCAD and E TopoDraw where bugs regarding calculation errors and output representation needed reporting.

After this was done for the next 10 or so days, I got an opportunity to make ribbons again, only this time, the company had found a very good solution to making ribbons automatically and I was required to test consistency of spelling, shortcuts and representations of various fields in the ribbon. It was a good learning experience. After I completed this assignment, I was required to test the source-code of the softwares and make corrections wherever I felt appropriate.

This work was really amazing. I got to learn how complex a software code can become if not handled properly. Punctuation (in warnings and message box) and Comments can play a colossal role in writing a code. We at ESS were now planning on starting projects under Water supply and Water Management.

I was given an Excel sheet and find out how water distribution calculations were taking place at different points of the Excel sheet. I had to first document the findings and report it to the developers there. I learnt a lot on how complicated a City’s water design can be. There are several mathematical aspects that need to be taken care of while designing a Sewage system and rain water drain. After a satisfactory amount of study was done, we decided to organize a water supply design workshop on EPAnet. This workshop was organized at Hotel Parijatha GateWays and most of my uncle’s Customers enthusiastic in this software had come from different parts of India. It was fun to organize and learn the software firsthand from the people from EPAnet. It was fun learn, download tutorials, burn the contents and label the CDs for the workshop.

It was also the time we started looking for customers on an international level. Our products had been proved to be consistent in Dubai, Philipines and Africa. However the standards needed a makeover and work began on how to solve problems regarding different file formats such as CSV. Different countries follow different formats of data representation such as a choice between comma or space to separate numerals, to represent decimals as subscript, superscript, comma, semicolon etc. And we needed to make solutions to these entities based on requirements. Further, the company had undertaken good measures to help customers learn from help videos which can be found on their youtube channel. Then company has also begun to provide details of various CAD and Excel usage information to beginners in the field from their blog CivilCADSoft.com.

One of the most remarkable thing that happened during this tenure was however that I got called for a meeting on deciding what changes needed to be done to improve their YouTube videos. It was as if a meeting is no different than any other conversation, except that you need to be sure about whatever you have to put across.

Work Culture:

I have seen a lot of variation in work culture during my service to ESS. The office starts at 9:30 and you can go home when your work for the day is done. I don’t really know the closing time but I suppose it is 6:00 PM because that’s when everyone else usually left. Afternoon there is break of 1 hour for lunch. Evening everyone takes break for snacks at about 5:00 PM, however, not everyone leaves the office at the same time. The company provides support by Phone, TeamViewer and Skype. Some people go a bit late for the break because at least one person is required to provide support at any time. Interviews are conducted and candidates who pass the aptitude are called for a technical round based on performance. Employees are given a definite assignment which they are required so complete by a specified time. Mr. Indrajeet makes amazing drawings using different drawing tools for the company products and other company requirements. And I would like to thank Mr. Arshal for the countless number of chocolates that he used to distribute.

P.S. The company has now been renamed to E Surveying Softech India (Pvt.) Ltd.

What did I learn from all this?
* I got to use my knowledge in properly formatting text documents which has helped me in several report submissions.
* I learnt the importance of Punctuality and time-management.
* I got to apply a lot of what i already knew and learnt many new skills.
* I spent my holidays in a pleasant way.
* I got good exercise walking 2 Km everyday, something that I very much need now at Manipal.

Some quick links to the company's resources:

Esurveying - www.esurveying.net
ESurveyCAD - www.esurveycad.com
Blog Survey Drawing - http://blog.surveydrawing.net
Esurvey Earth - http://esurveyearth.com
Esurvey Lisp - www.esurveylisps.com
Quick help for all the products - help.esurveycad.com

No is an answer

noreply@blogger.com (Ganesh Kamath) — Sat, 31 Dec 2011 22:17:00 -0800

No is an answer!!!

We ask for most things in life in order to get it. We are so used to the answer yes that we take it for granted.

No is perhaps the most powerful answer. However it is not a good thing to use this answer very often. When someone says could you mail me that picture please on Facebook, try replying with a 'No' and you will know what i mean.

We learn to try different activities as and when we get an answer ‘Yes’. The path of the ‘No’ is not travelled by many. Though i seem to be taking a philosophical road, more things will be revealed as we go through this page.

In SwatKats we can see that Lieutenant Felina keeps telling that she “does not take No for an answer”. Einstein says that ,it was because people said no, that he tried it himself.

Why is it that we tend to accept most answers when they are in our favour. The reason behind this goes well into our childhood where our parents tell us no to things that they find inappropriate, and we also conclude it by proving them right, i here refer to those of us who have had a mischevious childhood (^_^).

No is thought of as something negative, and hence i have called it a path of the less travelled. However, in many cases man tells know because he finds it beyond his power to explain something and people after him tend to stop at the ‘No’.

One illustration is the 100 year unchallenged success of Newtonian theory that layed the foundation of physics of objects and the shaking of the foundation by the emergence of Einstein’s theories of relativity. It was believed that Newton’s theories were flawless and people after him did not dare question his genius (After all Newton has innumerable contributions to Physics & Mathematics which include Newton's Colour disc, Newton’s Prism Experiment, Newton’s Laws of motion, Newton-Raphson Iteration, Calculus, Principia Mathematica, etc. ). Newton (“he was one man too much”) added so much to the beauty of physics at once that people failed to see that there were flaws; apart from this there wasn’t sufficient technology to look beyond his theories.

It is even funnier that we can actually lead an entire life believing what we know as true and those things that we are ignorant of as fiction. This happens in more cases than not.

However lets get serious, consider a situation where you have worked really really hard on an assignment spending your precious time on an assignment, and then your friends start asking you for the assignment. While telling No looks like a legitimate thing to do. We are often taken aback because we are not used to saying No. There is fear of unknown, in this sense, it is as if you have defied friendship if you give No as the answer. And lieing is definitely a bad alternative, instead leave some part to finish later so that your assignment remains incomplete till the last moment (^_^).

No is a very good thing answer when it comes to handling addictions. For example there are several people who say ‘No’ to smoking, ‘No’ to alcohol, ‘No’ to ajinomoto. In such scenarios, ethics looks like a very good back up for the answer so we just go ahead and give ‘No’ as an answer. The world would be a much better place if people co-operatively said no to carcinogens, pollution, plastic, adulterated food and other consumer products (Inspired from ‘Captain Planet’). However, ‘No’ is not a natural answer, it is not something everyone willingly says till there is some kind of a catch, or some kind of crisis.

In movies we see that a hero simply can’t say no to the wishes of a heroine. In real life, we fear to say ‘No’ to our elders, teachers, boss, colleagues, friends, relatives, cultural beliefs, superstitions and pay the price for not accepting ‘No’ as an answer. Though we are helpless in certain scenarios, we can bring about a drastic change in many cases.

‘No’ has been the cause of revolutions in many cases in history and entertainment:

1) It was Mahatma Gandhiji’s ‘No’ to the British that freed India.

2) It was Adolf Hitler’s ‘No’ to the Jews that made him the dictator.

3) It was Steve Jobs’ ‘No’ that brought Apple to the height it has attained today.

4) It was Dark Vader’s ‘No’ to the good side of the force that made him achieve a much higher level from the dark side of the force (^_~).

5) It is Samurai Jack’s ‘No’ to Aakhoo that keeps him going until he accomplishes his goal.

In elementary English grammar, No is simply the opposite the Yes, however in real life no is so much more.

People in India organize strikes to say ‘No’ to an organizations actions. (I hate the idea of strikes, because it affects the productivity of the nation and causes several setbacks). Though strikes are a way of demanding our interests, there are several other ways which need to be tried out in the form of negotiation in this particular issue.

A pen-down strike is a way of conveying our disinterest to education from a particular teacher.

When your day starts bad, say ‘No’ and do your best to live in the present and make it go good. If its exam time say ‘No’ to World Cup and Facebook. Even the word Know has a ‘No’ in it.

The Lok-Pal bill is an attempt to say 'No' to corruption, please support the movement.

Talking to yourself

noreply@blogger.com (Ganesh Kamath) — Tue, 27 Dec 2011 11:27:00 -0800

Talking to yourself

In many situations we find that some people around us seem to be talking to themselves. You might have even found that you were talking to yourself sometimes.

Sometimes when there is too much to think and you work really hard on finding a solution you tend to mutter random words. These things happen because while our mind tries to adjust to these new situations, we try different approaches and wires kind of get crossed?

Some people may call you crazy when they find you talking to you, but this is more common than people think. If you observe a person sitting in a bus-stand carefully you can observe some of them doing this without their own knowledge.

Talking to yourself can happen when you suddenly remember an incident that according to you could have happened in a different way. You might not actually say anything and just be acting out a bit, but if you think you could have done something different that made a difference then the people around you can notice it in you.

Most people don’t like to be told that they had been talking to themselves because, in olden movies of India, people were shown talking to themselves and this caused people into believing that talking to oneself was a sign of madness. However it has been proven to be false and there haven’t been any movies on that yet!!! (Not one that says its not crazy but here are several that show that this kind of self talking is common).

We talk to ourselves because we know that by taking thinking just a step further, we might actually stumble upon an enlightening idea. Some people cant do hard math without acting out the problem a little bit. It might seem like they are writing something on an invisible board, but trust me it helps them get closer to the solution in reality.

More often than not, we are scared of telling something out in public and this causes us to express what we think of by first telling it to our-selves. The phrase, ‘Look before you leap’ can be thought of a better way of saying this. We first check if the answer we are going to give is legitimate by trying it out in our heads, this happens to spill out in the form of talking to ourselves.

Another scenario where a person talks to oneself could be repentance or self pity. You have those moments in your life where you miss out an opportunity purposefully and the start regretting it as if doing something now can reverse the effect.

Remember you are the only one who thinks that way because you are unique. There might be times in your life where you felt a joke was really funny but when you told it loud, no one really responded well to it and you admitted defeat in trying to convince them about the humour.

The problem with telling something loud is that we as social beings are very conscious of our social image and in most cases don’t like to left as outcasts and try to blend into the society rather than trying to set a new genuine social standard.

If you start searching, you will get lots of opinions online. However I leave it you you decide what to do about talking to yourself.

There is often a trade-off between expressing yourself and sacrificing what you image you have presented to the world till that point.

We can see many instances of talking to oneself in cartoons, for instance tom has those miniaturized satan and angel whenever he plans something evil in ‘The Tom and Jerry Show’. From which we can see an illustration of having a clear conscience on the issues which we deal. The number of movies where people talking to themselves being depicted is massive, some of the famous movies include, ‘Cast Away’, ‘Fight Club’, ‘A beautiful Mind’, ‘Harry Potter’, etc.

Having imaginary friends, dolls that you talk to (including Johny’s Plank in ‘Ed Edd n Eddy'), speaking to God, day dreaming all are considered to talking to your-self.

We are beings of very superior intellect compared to those around us and our mind acts as feedback mechanism to guide our actions before we perform them.

How and Why of blog

noreply@blogger.com (Ganesh Kamath) — Sun, 25 Dec 2011 23:52:00 -0800

Why Blog?

There can be several answers to the question why blog. I first started blogging to check if my views of the world around me the way I see it was consistent with what everyone else out there on the internet also did. Surprisingly though many people have acknowledged that they too share similar opinion there was a lot more I learnt.

You can blog on any topic of your choice. You can create a fresh topic and blog. You can maintain a blog that can give specific detail that will help them get a certain result. Or write a blog based on what has helped you when you were overcome be a problem.

Either ways blog writing requires that a person express whatever he wishes to convey. I have seen a few friends earn from their blog through Google Adsense, but I mis-used this option and got banned when I click-bombed my own blog (lol (^_~)) in the initial days of blogging just to findout what would happen.

Essentially when you blog you are looking to create an awareness on a certain idea or an issue. A blog can be a means to share ideas and discuss issues you might thing to bring light on. A blog on the online game DOTA for example can help you get opinions from several gamers across the globe it can also help you to spread your opinion on a certain game character or strategy that you might find interesting.

Blogging is extremely fun also. When you invest time on something you like doing it tends to take your mind off many daily routines that you follow.

You can blog on things that your you would keep wondering about in your head otherwise.

Though most blogs are written as ideas flow into your head, there are certain set of steps that you can follow to make your blog a success. (note: blog = content + intent)

1) Spend time putting the content together, formatting the content.

2) Find appropriate pictures flow chart to go with your blog.

3) Try to get your content reviewed by a friend who is online when you post it.

4) Reply to every single query on your blog no matter how small or big it happens to be.

5) Don’t mind for critics. But don’t underestimate them as well.

6) Though it is insisted that you follow a logically neutral idea, I don’t really follow this rule of blogging.

7) Select a good background for your blog. And design it as your heart points out.

As of now i haven’t blogged beyond Blogger. But you may find other blogs out there which suits you.

How Blog?

Now that you know the whys of blogging here is a procedure i recommend while first starting a blog:

1) Open chrome

2) www.google.co.in/

3) Click on ‘more’ tab and then ‘even more’ option.

4) Under ‘communication show and share’ you will see an orange icon with a label ‘Blogger’.

5) Click on it. Fill in your details and start blogging.

To know any-more details you can visit: http://bloghackz.com/

Shadow Walking

noreply@blogger.com (Ganesh Kamath) — Sun, 25 Dec 2011 09:40:00 -0800

Shadow Walking:

It’s a warm sunny day and you are walking by the side of the road, you choose a side of the road that is shadier than the other this happens unconsciously and here I term it as shadow walking (Not to be confused by the shadow blending technique used by a ninja (^_~)).

We learn to walk in a very early age, but even before we walk we are acquainted with a sense of direction to take in-order to reach a target.

It can be observed that when you are walking from point ‘A’ to point ‘B’, you will almost always tend to take the shortest path if not for a shadiest path on a very sunny day. Shadows have been a mystery for several generations of scientists. Though there are several descriptions on the science behind the principle of formation of shadows, there still remain several explanations on what effects shadows have on our lives. We tend to over look several of such aspects.

The choice of a path we take while walking depends on intention for walking as well as environmental and surrounding factors such as level of traffic, presence/absence of ditch by the side of the road, time of the day, number of houses with dogs inside the compound that regularly bark when a stranger goes by, etc.

Why particularly dedicate a post to shadow walking?

I have observed that depending on the intensity of sun’s heat, the number of times a person crosses a road varies. If there are large gaps between shadier sides of the road, then the person maintains a path that will keep him in the shade at the most. This behaviour tends to override our natural behaviour to continue in the shortest path. If the weather is not that warm then the number or road cross for the same terrain significantly comes down.

The speed of walking in the shadowed region depends on the distance covered so far as well as the Line of sight distance of the road still left to cover on the same path.

Age severely affects this factor. Older people tend to stick to the shortest path no matter what. The behaviour of other animals to this phenomenon is not yet conclusively studied, however similar results are expected.

From history we learn that Great emperors such as Ashoka used to plant trees by the side of the read so that travellers could take sufficient rest while taking long journeys.

The shadow of an object at any time of the day is influenced by the position of the sun, this is what makes people take different paths to the same destination.

I remember watching one special episode of ‘The Mask’ where people loose their shadows and start aging rapidly. There is even an episode in ‘Duck Tales’ where Magica gives life to her shadow, and the shadow tries to overthrow her. Shadow arts fascinate me even today.

To make sure that they remain in shade, taking an umbrella with you is a good practice. This also comes in handy in case there are chances of rain (^_^).

Man in the mirror

noreply@blogger.com (Ganesh Kamath) — Fri, 23 Dec 2011 07:16:00 -0800

How many times have you wondered if the mirror was real or not as a child?

The person in the mirror looks exactly like you and you see yourself through him. He knows all your external flaws and you see him every day. The man in the mirror always listens to whatever you tell, he never complains, never interrupts, never argues, never gets angry at whatever you tell him. He just listens, he is angry if you are angry, sad if you are sad, happy if you are happy and smiles if you smile.

The man in the mirror grows old with you. He has always been there for you when you expected him to be. You can't really be sure if he isn’t there when you aren’t looking but then that isn’t really your problem.

You can sing, read an essay, tell him your worries and wishes. You can share your life’s deepest secrets with him and you dreams and ambitions, he just listens.

Man in the mirror even knows what happens behind your back.

Man in the mirror knows what you are and what you are going to be.

He helps to see if your hair style is right, he makes you aware that you haven’t shaved from a long time. He even reminds you to get a haircut when the hair has grown quite long. He helps you find out if your wounds have healed yet. He helps you to look closer into things which would not be possible otherwise. When you look at his eyes you see yourself.

Despite all this we don’t thank the man in the mirror because we tend to ignore his presence. We don’t generally wave him good bye when we are out for work or greet him when we get back home. We don’t thank him for his services and nor do we acknowledge him when we go to bed. He is there waiting for you every second to get back at you and you don’t even notice that.

Man in the mirror looks the same every time you see him. He is going to be there even if the mirror gets damaged or broken. He is God sent and will be with you no matter what. He is bound to you for life so treat him with respect and honour.

Like the great Mahatma Gandhi once said, "Be the change you want to see in this world", you can see what ever change you want in yourself through a mirror.

To conclude, here is a poem from Rajdeep's speech:

You may win in your struggle for self, and the world may make you kind or queen for a day

but just look at the mirror and see what that person has to say

for its not your teachers, friends or colleagues, whose judgement on you must pass

the verdict that counts most in your life, is the person looking back from the glass.

How to swat a Mosquito

noreply@blogger.com (Ganesh Kamath) — Thu, 27 Oct 2011 23:24:00 -0700

How to swat a Mosquito

It is a common experience that a mosquito makes its presence felt due to it’s characteristic ‘Kuin’ sound, coupled by the annoying irritation it leaves behind after biting human-beings.

It is very interesting that we tend to observe a mosquito only after we hear the sound most of the times. There is generally a 5 second delay associated with us being able to track down a mosquito after it’s presence is felt for the first time.

Though the hatred towards mosquito comes due to its blood sucking habit, it is most hated because of it’s annoying sound mechanism.

After having detected and located a mosquito, a human-being tries to attempt to murder the mosquito by a clap kind of action. However, in most cases, this action goes in vein and the mosquito escapes; the first attempt to murder generally fails because we tend to over-estimate our abilities and do not take into consideration our size to speed ratio as compared to that of the mosquito. Also we in most situations act impulsively instead of a careful planning and this leads to a lot of disappointment.

Just as a culprit always returns to the sceene of the crime like in Sherlock holmes novels, a mosquito also tends to return to its initial point of sound detection, most smart and experienced people take this into consideration while killing a mosquito.

Some advanced experienced people can swat a fly in one hand. Though this skill is very handy, it is not appreciated by people in the surrounding, such people are considered show-offs and incase they fail to get the fly, the disappointment is usually doubled. Swatting in one hand also tends to leave a lot of mess.

In some scenarios, there can be a compromise between killing a mosquito and getting the wall dirty and the mosquito tends to get away in such cases.

Apart from manually killing a mosquito there are approaches such as:

Poisoning a mosquito by sprays, mosquito mats, mosquito coils…
Use of variety of tricks to repel a mosquito
Spreading excessive smoke in an attempt to suffocate a mosquito(lol)
Some use fly-swatters and advanced fly glues.

Sometimes swatting of a fly like a mosquito can attract a lot of attention, especially in public places and hence many people tend to restrain themselves.

It is also a practice to hunt down a mosquito for a sport especially during exam times by students or while writing an assignment near the due date where there is a tendance to make that extra time just to feel that pleasure of achieving something, for a time-pass event.

Some people let cobwebs accumulate in their rooms in hopes of mosquitoes getting trapped in them, but this is a false notion as most mosquitoes can effectively dodge a cob web.

Algorithm to swat a Mosquito:
Step 0:Make sure you are free and have time to swat a mosquito, make sure you are not in a public or a very fancy place, make sure you are in a situation to move freely.
Step 1: START
Step 2: Detect the mosquite. Be alert and do not consider any indication of a mosquito's presence as a stray noise. Remember, 'Kuin' is the signature sound of the mosquito.
Step 3: Once the mosquito is detected, try to look at its trajectory.
Step 4: If the mosquito sits on you to bite you. Take the opportunity to kill the mosquito with one tieght blow. go to END.
Step 5: Else if you find the mosquito strategically sitting on a wall, then try to clap about 1 cm from the wall, this is approximately where the mosquito will likely be by the time you get to it. Do not dirty the wall over a mosquito, the paint job will not be worth it. go to END.
Step 6: Else if you find the mosquito to be moving around in circle, take about 6 seconds to trace its path, then jump and kill the mosquito in one smooth movement. go to END.
Step 7: Else if you dont find the mosquito, go to step 2.
Step 8: END

The queen of chess-a bird's eye view

noreply@blogger.com (Ganesh Kamath) — Sat, 22 Oct 2011 09:29:00 -0700

The queen of chess - a bird's eye view

Have you ever wondered why the queen of chess is that powerful?

I have never come across a satisfactory answer to my questions regarding the powers behind the queen of chess, hence I have made an attempt myself to solve this quandary.

The whole idea of the queen being that powerful is centered around 2 ideas:

1) The queen being the most powerful pawn makes the queen the most vulnerable thing on the board thus taking our concentration off the king.

2) The second reason however is that it is the most precious thing that you can lose. I mean think about it, would you lose the queen for a reason you can name right now... you cannot lose anything more precious than the queen. (you might say okay queen for queen, queen for winning the game... but giving up a queen does make you think for at least some time (~_^)).

We can think of this as a feminine dominance, but if you really think about it is definitely so much more than that. Carom has a red piece often referred to as the queen. You won’t be able to complete the royal flush in Poker if not for a queen in fact a lot of games of poker have been lost because of the queen. You will find a lot more occurrences of such pattern; however in chess the queen has won the hearts of generations of people and continues to do so even today. Mysteriously however, there seems to be only one female piece in each of these games...

I can bet you that if the queen of chess and the queen of hearts were real figures today, there would be a lot of envy in the atmosphere.

I am not a very good chess player myself, for the record; I have lost over 60 games of chess to Mr. Prashanth Saraf in my PUC (One of which included playing a game without the queens). However the mystery behind the powers of the queen was what I was most interested in chess.

A queen has the combined powers of the bishop and the rook. Losing a queen marks the beginning of the end for most chess games. It is evident that when a pawn moves to the other side, it more often than not, chooses to reincarnate as a queen.

Religion also has extended the notion of feminine power by giving equal prominence to Goddesses just as given to Gods; don’t be offended if you come across conflicting statistics.

It has got to do with a whole new way of looking at the world. A female definitely looks at the world in a way different than men look at it. Though for some reason females rarely take opportunity to rise above others, we have seen occasions where female have made much more difference than what was expected from men. This kind of forms the foundations that have led to the powers behind the queen of chess.

Historically the pawn was called as the minister and had different powers, but it was not until it got renamed as the queen that the game became a house hold name and eventually reached the fame we see today.

Even when it comes to fashion, the queen gets her colour in chess. A white queen begins on the white square and a black queen on black.

It’s not like you can’t win the game without your queen, but once you lose a queen there is a hell lot of de-motivation. For example, I once met a guy who would take a queen for a queen just to de-morale you enough for him to eventually win the game.

Yes a guy will probably do anything to get a female to smile or to stop her from crying but we are looking only at the shadow of something really huge here. However on the contrary, as my friend Arpita Nandi says 'a broken nails hurts wayyyy more than a broken heart!'. That's exactly how much it means.

The real answer to the power of the queen might even lie in the fact that the queen being the only female on the board if not for the opponent queen. And there is lot of effort a female puts to get rid of any competition (^.^). The queen is the tallest pawn on the board because you simply cant afford to loose track of it! however, the crown makes the king reach the same height as the queen (*-*)

Furthermore, when the game of chess begins, we can see that the two queens are looking at each other, just waiting for the right opportunity to kill the other.

In fact the queen of chess is a real icon of power. This topic definitely spans beyond culture, politics, fashion, history, sociology, romance and ideology.

If you look at the chess board itself, you will find that it is symmetric if not for the king and the queen. It is as if power has been sacrificed for importance.

While the king stands to be prominent - last thing that you can lose on the game, the queen holds the most power - the last thing you wish to lose in a game.

The game will become really complicated if you give equal power to the king as well as the queen, because now you will just have to keep your eyes on two pawns which are equally important to you. Chess is a game based on strategy. What more strategy can there be than to let a female come up with a strategy for you... (just kidding).

On the contrary, we have seen how modern politics is revolving around females such as Sonia Gandhi, Hilary Clinton, Aung suu kyi, Julia Gillard, Angela Markel. Also the changes that took place when Mrs. Indira Nooyi took over as CEO of Pepsi Co. stand as a landmark in the corporate world and many of the multi-million-dollar companies started looking forward to having a female CEO. I would also like to include the case of recently fired Yahoo CEO, Carol Bartz but that is clearly out of discussion (^_~).

I remember playing a game in engineering where I helped my friend Prerana (a.k.a piranah) win a game against Gokul, who had initially taken away the two rooks on Prerana’s side and we mysteriously won the game by controlling 2 bishops (lol). Gokul was a real pro, so were Abhishek and Abhilash.

Some days we used to play chess on the bus on a magnetic chess set one of the seniors used to bring. However over time we got addicted to dumb-charades and forgot all about chess.

Relevance of a queen in modern Television and literature:

1) If you have seen the movie 300 you will find King Leonidas paying a lot of respect to the women of Sparta and deliver's the movie's signature dialogue- "THIS IS SPARTA" at the Persian ambassador before he kicks him into the bottomless pit (^_^).

2) If you watch White Collar you will see that the protagonist Neil sacrifices a lot and takes a lot of risk to get to the girl he loves the most – Kate.

3) And no piece of modern literature shouts of the power of femininity louder than Dan Brown's best selling (and controversial) novel- The Da Vinci Code.

4) Oh and when we talk about the queen, we might also note that there is a queen of hearts in the famous novel/movie Alice in the wonderland book by Louise Carol who was originally a mathematician specializing in Linear Algebra.

5) We even find that for a product to click in the market a famine touch usually does the trick. If you have seen the movie Kill Bill completely, then you will keep wondering what happens in the end of the second part. However the action might be justified in a woman’s world. I don’t know... (I don’t want to spoil the movie for you).

6) You will see the way a guy will give up even the most lucrative of offers for the sake of a woman in several cases, take Goodwill Hunting for example, he gives up an opportunity to work in the NSA for a woman he meets in the bar. (Do watch the movie, it is so much more.)

7) On a serious note the film Munich gives you a look into the things a woman strategist (Prime minister Golda Meir) is capable of. William Congreve probably had one such woman in mind when he said- "Heaven has no rage like love to hatred turned, Nor hell hath fury like a woman scorned"

8) If you watch The Big Bang theory you might be familiar with Secret Agent Laser Obstacle Chess... ha ha ha enough said I guess. Further he (Sheldon) extends the powers of the queen and creates a character called the Grand Empress a piece combining the power of the knight queen and the serpent!!! in the 3 persons chess. (serpent is a pawn that will cause the affected pawn to die within 2 moves from the encounter). How ever the circular chess board is more appealing to me because it kind of looks more legit.

9) Though the image of The Mahabharath comes to mind when we speak about mythology, women and war; the Greek epic Iliad also testifies the whole war-for-women idea.

There are several connections that can be seen in the novel that have been discussed under the queen of chess discussion as of now, for instance:

1) Hector's wife Andromeda is known to have blamed Helen alone for the entire duration (18 years) for which the war had been fought (female trying to eliminate competition).

2) The competition of the Goddesses of Mt.Olympus regarding which one of them was the most beautiful was the reason behind the whole Trojan war.

It all boils down to this picture (A picture is worth a 1000 words)

Stage Fear-How I finally over came it

noreply@blogger.com (Ganesh Kamath) — Tue, 11 Oct 2011 05:45:00 -0700

Stage Fear-How I finally over came it

The Fear:

It was in the First year of PUC that I came face to face with my stage fear. Though I was hyperactive and mischievous in School to the extent that I did not care who was watching, I had changed to a totally different person after 10^th standard.

We had a very nice teacher in my PUC at Sri Vidya Mandir, whose name was Lalitha Iyer and she taught us Physics. Towards the end of the semester, she announced that there was an opportunity for anyone to take a seminar. I liked astronomy very much and I was happy that I had got the Hertzprung Russel Diagram. I read the topic thoroughly and got lot of information over the Internet and expected a real good performance.

When my turn came I quickly went up to the board. Started explaining, but suddenly realized that all of my classmates were actually looking at me. Suddenly I could hear my heartbeat (yes I too have a heart). All of a sudden evenyone in front of me was a blur. I managed to get the words out clearly though was gramatically incorrect at several places, however I had completed speaking in 5 minutes a presentation content which was supposed to last 20 minutes as per the teacher.

I stood there looking at everyone, wondering what else to say next. I looked at a sheet which I had taken to the stage but at this point, the sheet appeared to be a language I could not recognize. My feet were shaking, my face and hands were sweating. My voice had dropped and I was feeling as if someone was holding a torch at my face.

Fortunately, the teacher prompted some questions which I answered correctly from the stage. The answers I gave, helped me in expanding what I could relate to ‘Hertzpurng Russel (HR) diagrams’, and quickly summarized the topic once again.

Walking back to my seat after the talk was the hardest part. After having reached the seat, my stomach felt as if it was snowing inside. There was a kind of chill arising at every part of my body. However, my feet were still shaking and arms were sweatier than ever, quite a strange experience I can say now; but at that point, I thought I would surely die (~_^).

I now knew that I had stage fear and I had to do something to over-come it!!! I asked my friends looking for a solution, but got nothing out of it. I remember reading that only by practice could one actually get over stage fear.

Now I had to find opportunities to practice, but since I am a very shy person. Even though it took a long time; finally in the First Year of my Engineering at Amrita School of Engineering that I got my opportunity.

The Comeback:

We had an amazing teacher called Tharini ma’am for Physics, she announced that interested students could give seminar on some topics that were not going to be covered. I quickly took the ‘Liquid Drop Model’. I had very little knowledge of this model but I had heard my PUC physics teacher talk about the model once and decided that this was the moment to change.

I read the text book thoroughly. Referred internet and became confident on what I was going to say. I organized the topics in the order that I was going to talk in the presentation. Then I wrote down the topic names to check if I could associate the contents to be addressed in the topic. I had some doubts, the teacher told me to skip over the doubts, but I was determined and finally just before the seminar managed to figure out the solution to my doubt.

On the day of the seminar, I went to the stage and checked out the view from the stage. Then just before the seminar, I greeted everyone with a smile and began. It went really really well, and the teacher was really impressed the way I explained the part which she had not solved earlier. The best part was I never even realized time fly by. I then indulged everyone in the question answer session and completed the presentation with a ‘Thank You (^_^)’.

It was as if this was a landmark in my public speaking. I confidently gave the presentation on 'Tokamak Fusion Reactor' in my third year of engineering. All further presentations in my life were a cake walk.

Even in my MS when I gave my presentation on, 'Skype Peer to Peer Internet Telephony Protocol', I got a very good response. It was as if the initial friendship with the stage had bloomed into a beautiful relationship.

You might get several suggestions from other people on what you can do to get rid of your stage fear. I don’t oppose any other form of getting used to the stage. It surely takes confidence, practice and a great deal of knowledge hunt to over come stage fear. But at the end of the day, remember... It does not matter if you fall, as long as you get up and keep walking.

Walk Overtaking and why we kick stones

noreply@blogger.com (Ganesh Kamath) — Wed, 28 Sep 2011 02:43:00 -0700

Walk Overtaking and why we kick stones…

Walking is the means of reaching our destination by foot. While walking, some people tend to walk faster than others. Different people walk at different speeds at different times of the day.

Overtaking is the phenomenon by which, a person walking behind another is found to be ahead of him at a different instance of time ahead of the current. In a more geekish sense, the position of the two people is swapped over time and distance. We are very familiar with the way vehicles overtake one another on the road. A lot of this overtaking pattern is seen to be similar with the way humans overtake during walking.

Some people find it in-acceptable to suppress their walking speed just to adjust to the people ahead of them. Some find it thrilling to be ahead of another person. While overtaking a pedestrian, the “left-to-right ratio” calculated by the distance available to overtake from the left divided by the distance available to overtake from the right, is a very important factor. In most situations, this factor alone decides which side a person gets overtaked while walking.

To prevent a person from overtaking you, make sure you try to block him on the side of you whichever is of larger distance.

There generally is a lot of hesitation when it comes to overtaking a handicapped person, because, even if you are successfully able to overtake him, there lays a sense of pity and un-satisfaction. Most people prefer to walk side by side or take an alternative path if feasible.

People don’t care if small children overtake them. However, older people don’t like it when adolescents overtake them, due to the mixture of helplessness and envy.

Overtaking a pedestrian by running past him is viewed in a totally different way. Firstly you make it very clear that you are going to overtake so a path is made clear. Since walking and running are considered different activities, nobody cares if you get ahead, because it can’t technically be a competition.

We are born with this instinct to overtake. Even if we don’t have anybody to overtake while walking, we tend to kick stones on the pavement, observe the path taken by the stone, try to catch up with the stones motion and tend to repeatedly kick the stone over and over till one of the following may happen:

· We reach the destination

· We have someone else to overtake

· The stone gets kicked off into some un-retrievable region.

I remember a day when I had kicked a stone all the way from my school to my home. Most people discover kicking the stone as an activity by themselves. It is fascinating how an extremely irregular stone can take seemingly predictable trajectory.

Though the habit of kicking stones as we walk lasts only for a short time, every once in a while, if we find a large stone in the middle of a road, we tend to not be able to resist the idea of slowly kicking the stone over to one side of the road.

Like I had mentioned in the blog on ‘Advice Proximity Effect’, gender, age difference, posture and height play a very important in overtaking mechanism. However, additionally facial expressions, mood of a person, choice of arena, level of urgency we can determine the success of overtaking.

Mood is perhaps the biggest influential factor and can cause a person to participate or give up in this overtaking activity:

Case 1: Consider the scenario, where you have had a good night’s sleep, had a great breakfast and have left home early-enough to reach the destination. This is when you feel that no force on earth can stop you, and you find yourself overtaking the most number of people.

Case 2: On the contrary, suppose you had a very bad day for reasons that can be due to one or more of the following incidents however several others not mentioned in the list can also be a reason for having a bad day:

· You have been working all day and are very tired.

· You got you test results and are not happy.

· You broke up.

· You did not get a certain expected output.

· Your dog died.

· Your best friend has left school.

…

In such scenarios, you feel like you don’t need one more competition to judge your talent and seem to give up on an opportunity to overtake a person while walking.

If the mood has been bad, due to a combination of the above mentioned reasons. Then you may even lack the concentration to walk, let alone overtaking or kicking a stone along… We can see this beautifully illustrated in the movie ‘Jab We Met’.

Anger is one more serious factor influencing kicking stones... If you are angry on one more person, each time you kick you sometimes can see the the persons face on the stone just before your feet touch the stone (^_~). It does depend on the level of the anger. If you are in some kind or irrational wrath, then you tend to look at the world around you just as i have described in the sad mood part.

Pen Dynamics

noreply@blogger.com (Ganesh Kamath) — Sat, 17 Sep 2011 06:27:00 -0700

Pen dynamics:

Dynamics is the study of motion of bodies. Well what has that got to do with a pen??? In our every day occasion we can see people twirling pen between their fingers. The motion of the pen around the pen and landing in an exact position which makes it appear as if he intended to hold it as we do when writing is studied in pen dynamics.

Origin: Pen dynamics originally began when students who were bored by a teachers continuous nagging in a class started thinking of productive ways to use the time.

It might have begun in any part of the world. But there are several points of origin to this art and there are newer and newer versions of the twirling seen in everyday lives.

Some learn the art to show that they are skilful. Others use it to show-off in a class. Some attempt to reverse the direction of the motion and find success. But at this point we must see that what began as a means to utilize time productively has just ended up in entertainment.

Some do it so often, that they don’t even realize doing it at times. Some people have developed the skill so well that they can do it continuously without ever stopping (^_^).

There are parameters that guide the motion of the pen which can be proved by solutions to newtons laws of dynamics, but let not get into that right now. Because these are passive skills that were achieved without doing those tedious calculations.

Pen-dynamics just like any other area of study has its own restrictions. For one, it is found to be very effective with dot pens. But when tried on fountain pen, the results turn out to be really messy. However because of the underlying principle the pen manages to followed the expected trajectory in both the scenarios.

Men are familiar with the arts of pen dynamics more than woman, there are very few woman who can perform this skill. Pen dynamics enthusiasm generally develops right at the time we reach the dynamics section of physics in our schools. But very few people manage to cultivate this as an active hobby and take it all the way up to college.

However on entering corporate world, the kind of skill is no longer appreciated, also costlier pens tend to lose ink from the back (a phenomenon I can’t currently comprehend). Thus many of the cultivated art forms are lost in time.

In many of the occasions, elders often as a teacher or parents tend to tell us not to perform pen rotation in the open. This is causing a lot of harm to the survival of pen dynamics, and as students its our right to fight against such acts of silliness.

While looking over the net I have recently found links that help educate the people around the world to learn the art of pen rotation. The art is scientifically called as sonic(http://www.upsb.info/wiki/index.php?title=Sonic) and inverse sonic (http://www.upsb.info/wiki/index.php?title=Inverse_Sonic) for more details yoube it...

This art has many benefits which are overlooked most of the time. For one, it is a remedy for repetitive strain injury. It increases the dexterity of the user. Also it takes so much of the attention that it prevents us from yawning even in conditions of really boring lectures.

For all you know, this method might be one day used to generate energy needed for small electronic devices (ha ha ha ha ha... {(~_^)})

For all you know it might have a shorter solutions of gyration and other circular rotation problems.

Some people can even rotate pens around their fingers on both hands and simultaneously. Such accomplishments deserve awards!!!

I mean look at this beautiful phenomenon, an axis is formed around the finger that the pen rotates and the pen rotates due to centrifugal/centripetal force cancellation. The effect is also favoured by gravity because of which the two end states:Start and Stop are specific.

Pen Fights:

One of the more interesting extension of the pen dynamics lies with the traditional 'pen-fights'.

Unlike street fights, a pen fight is literally fought between pens. To begin with, the two pens are laid on a table or a bench. Traditionally a guy begins a pen fight with the toss of a coin. The objective of the game is to knock the other pen out of the arena.

Here, unlike in the previous case, there is no fixed axis of rotation. The pens traverse as they rotate and the mathematics can be quite complicated. However, a player can sometimes make startlingly accurate predictions about the trajectory that his pen is likely to take.

Pen fights are friendly games; however, a user must understand the risks before entering into a penfight!!! The pen might get damaged when it falls off the table. The pen might start leaking from the back. The pen might hit some other person in the vicinity.

Also Mutated version of this game are found in many schools where a pen is substituted by a marker. General dynamics can solve problems arising in those.

Sometimes, when pen fights are played in the midst of an ongoing lecture, there is also the added risk of exposure. It is still a mystery to me on how the two pens during a pen fight can land one on top of another. Especially when the two travel in the same plane collide and land up in strange positions. It is as if these objects can move from 2D(the surface on which the pen fights are played) to 3D because of some underlying mechanism....

Various unreported experiments have been conducted on pen fights, such as adding rubberband to a pen, combining 2 pens to check the trajectory, adding a cap from a spare pen to make it more stiff. However there is no clear documentation on any of the experiments because it is not taken seriously enough!!!!