Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaarrrghhhhhhh!!!!!

. . .  Computers will crash,
Mistakes are unavoidable,
There lies great wisdom :
. . .   in regularly backing up data 
Verily, it is true!

Learning to paint …

Well, twiddling with GIMP is pretty much fun. Here’re some of my attempts at cleaning up scans, and colouring them, while I’m nowhere near something like this, the practice can only be good for me.

All this thanks to great artwork by Aditi.

Some Movies

In no particular order:

• The Pursuit of Happyness
• Do the Right Thing
• Everything is Illuminated
• Babel
• Searching For Bobby Fischer
• Dor
• The Illusionist
• The Station Agent
  
• From Hell
• C’era una volta il West
• High Noon
• Il Buono, il Brutto, il Cattivo
• Bom yeoreum gaeul gyeoul geurigo bom
• Little Miss Sunshine
• Sen To Chihiro No Kamikakushi
• Dark City
• Twelve Monkeys
• Baraka
• Coffee And Cigarettes
• The Princess Bride
• Time Bandits
• Millers Crossing
• Fargo
• Once Upon a Time in America
• Goodfellas
• Snatch
• Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels
• Matchstick Men
• Dr Strangelove or How I learnt to Stop Worrying and Start Loving the Bomb
• Le Fabuleux destin d’Amélie Poulain
• Les Triplettes de Belleville
• La Vita e bella
• Delicatessen
• Back to the Future
• Pi
  
• The Big Lebowski
• Sweet November
• Khamosh Pani
• American History X
• Million Dollar Baby
• Dances with Wolves
• October Sky
• Sling Blade
• The Terminal
• Breakfast Club
• The Last Samurai
• It’s a Wonderful Life
• Suraj Ka Satvan Ghoda
• Scent of a Woman
• Bigger Than the Sky
• The Cider House Rules
• Gadjo Dilo
• Im Juli
• As Good as It Gets
• Seven Years in Tibet
• Schindler’s List
• Gandhi
• Battleship Potemkin
• Diarios de motocicleta
• Lawrence of Arabia
• Touching the Void
• The Englishman Who Went Up a Hill But Came Down a Mountain
• The Great Dictator
• Monty Python and the Holy Grail
• Ed Wood
• Pushpak
• Pulp Fiction
• Cidade de Deus
• Rounders
• Requiem for a Dream
• Snake in Eagles Shadow
• Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid

Some books

• Representation Theory : A First Course (Fulton & Harris)
• Symmetry & the Monster (Mark Ronan) [Not yet read]
• Gödel, Escher, Bach : An eternal golden braid (Douglas Hofstadter) : A popular level book on Gödel’s theorem and AI and related stuff. The first half is good, but the book drags on too much with unfounded speculation towards the end.
• Surreal Numbers (Donald E Knuth) : Aweird funny little book on set theoretic foundation of number theory.
• One Jump Ahead (Jonathan Schaeffer) : About Chinook, the checkers playing program
• Sophie’s World (Jostein Gaarder) : A sort of informal fun introduction to Western philosophy
• Foucault’s Pendulum (Umberto Eco)
• The Power of One (Courtenay Bryce)

The Gamma Song

Well, the idle mind is the devil’s workshop, but I’d say that a busy one, is a storehouse of crazy, arbit, stupid, meaningless & unwanted creativity. This time during the endsems, Shankar & I came up with “The Gamma Song“. It’s another parody of the famous(?) Llama Song^[1] Check it out if you like Physics/Maths/Stupidity or just have a lot of free time.

The Lyrics:

here's a gamma,there's a gamma
and another little gamma,
real gamma
virtua' gamma,
gamma gamma
look!

gamma gamma,
Riemann
gamma
tangent
Wick
rotate-a
gamma
gamma gamma,
squareroot
gamma
gamma gamma
look!

I was once a Tensor,
I lived in a space,
but I never saw the way
the indices were raised
I was just an A-mu,
but that fixed a gauge,
And now listen little child,
to this verbiage

did you ever see a gamma,
miss a gamma
hit a gamma,
gamma's gamma
curve of gamma
gamma gamma
look!

Affine gamma,
Dirac gamma,
Chiral gamma,
Basu,
gamma,
gamma with psi bar
a drama,
gamma gamma
look!

is it all in bold now?
is this all so weird?
is it made of tangent bundle?
h-cross
sigma
beard
Now our song is losing spin,
we've run out of ... look!
time for me to retire now,
and become a crook!

Blond Jokes

I don’t usually post one liner entries but, this is a really good blond joke, via Cosmic Variance.