All in a Night's work

Last night I did the following:

1. Helped the police in catching a murderer by tricking him into confessing.
2. Got caught in a tidal wave with a 100 other people and swam to safety to an island while taking out teabags from a cardboard box to dip in the sea. (The teabags seemed very important at the time)
3. Warded off a swarm of locust-like birds that were flying low over the sea.
4. Prevented a bunch of people from entering a painted sandcastle (more a sandhouse?) with a blue door. In actuality it was a time machine for the brain that caused you to think backwards.
5. Was pushed in a maze with multiple locked doors and multiple elevators. I found the right one to get out, to only be asked to play hopscotch on a terrace garden before I was allowed to leave. Playing hopscotch on a terrace garden is a difficult task, I tell you.
6. Learnt to hold my breath while sitting on my haunches, and sink to the bottom of a swimming pool for more than 5 minutes using a yogic technique which I am trying really hard to recall now.
7. Demonstrated some very intricate vintage embroidery techniques with big red beads and red thread. The demonstrations were held at the edge of the pool from #6 above, with short breaks when I sank down to the bottom of the pool again for practice.

As you would imagine, I am very exhausted. This weekend shall be spent relaxing after last night's adventures.

And the Mouse said to the Tiger

"Run! Else I am going to bite the back of your hind leg, and you know can't even reach me there."

So the Tiger ran away.


Moral: Valid logic can get you out of scrapes.

Pumping iron

The weight training class I joined this semester is, to use an overused sophomoric word, awesome.
We been throwing medicine balls, doing pull-ups, bench presses, free weights, squats with bands around our legs and uncountable crunches sitting on a Swiss ball. In the words of my instructor, "You are much stronger than you think you are. " Indeed.

Not to mention that we have been told to groan if we need to when lifting weights. Now I see.

The biography of a rag, a scrap piece of silicon, and a holey pocket

It is enlightening when I discover traits that I used to tease my mother about are the same set of traits that I cannot seem to shake off from myself anymore.

The basic philosphy carries in from my grandmother who told this little parable in Marathi, which roughly goes like this:
My mother had a sari which she wore for many years. When it became a little too worn to be worn, then she cut it up into two, and used them as light sun-curtains for two windows in the bedroom. When the curtains became a bit faded, she took them off, and used them as hair-drying towels, as they were soft cotton. When they got a little threadbare, they became dish-rags. The dish-rags turned into a floor mop, and finally when only strips of stringy cloth remained, they got thrown into the ragpicker's bag.

As is to be expected, the little story when told in its original colloquial Marathi, sounds much better than this dry version.

This is not as much of frugality as about innovation. Of finding multiple uses for a single item before its life is considered to have ended. Not use once and throw. But, use, reuse, use, reuse, recycle, use, reuse. My grandma and mom were using environmentally sustainable practices much before it was the new in-thing to do.

At least a fraction of it got retained into my generation. In the unavoidably resource-intensive field of semiconductor fabrication, I grin to myself when I use a single cleanroom wipe through a 6 hour process, use smaller pieces of silicon saving the scrap pieces for other dummy/test runs, reuse pieces when I can, and wonder what the heck is wrong with me since this is not even coming out of my pocket. Which reminds me, that I have a hole in this pocket I need to fix before I get too lazy and just go out and buy a new pair of jeans instead.

Books = $2.50, Enjoyment = priceless.

Reader's Digest's The Last Two Million Years : $1
Rodale's No-Fail Flower Garden: $1
Steinbeck's The Short Reign of Pippin IV: $0.50

Okay, so it is not like I found a rare book, and will make a million off it later, but there is nothing like spending only $2.50 on three books, and the pleasant anticipation of spending many quiet hours reading history and gawking over photographs of man-made artifacts of the last two millenia, contemplating new approaches towards sowing the perfect flower bed (once I have that perfect house!), and chuckling at the sad state of affairs M. Pippin finds himself in.

Life is good with a book in hand.

What were you doing on September 11, 2001?

The morning the political landscape and our lives in the US changed, I was getting ready to go to school. Driving from my house to my classmate's who was carpooling with me, I turned on the radio to my favorite music channel, 100.7, The River, I think...or was it NPR? No music. Two radio hosts were talking about a major attack on the WTC in New York. "The jet plane got flown into the twin towers, and while were thinking it was an accident, a second plane has hit the towers. This seems to be a terrorist attack." Picked up my friend and told her something major was up in New York.

School: Dr. H's VLSI design class. She started the class with saying, "I hope you are aware of the ghastly terrorist attack that has occurred in New York this morning. Please pray for the victims."

Came down to the student commons after class. The small place was very very crowded, with gray haired faculty, freckled freshmen...the whole lot. All looking up at the wall mounted television sets replaying the disaster. The room was, and continued to be very quiet, as the actual magnitude of the attack became clearer.

Went to my lab, and my labmate SD was trying to reach his mom on her cell phone. She went to work every morning taking the subway that passes underneath the WTC. We all sat and brooded and worried, while he kept trying to call her every 10 minutes or so. He didn't get through to her till the evening. She was safe but had walked most of the day to get back home after the subway and other public transport grinded to a halt.

How panic can spread, is evident by all the phone calls my parents in India fielded from concerned friends, asking if I was alright. Heck, I am in the midwest, and even they knew that. But they panicked with all the phone calls and kept trying to call me all day not getting through till the evening as well.

Gas prices hit the roof (went above $2) that night, we came up with strategies for car pooling.
The next day the city mayor ordered gas pump owners to keep prices under control, and we went back to our convenient single-car-occupant selves again.

I made history today

That was easy.

Help! Neverending days of Summer!

A plan to watch a historic outdoor 70th anniversary screening of Gone with the Wind got washed out with the thunderstorms, so we ended up watching "500 days of Summer" at Carolina Theater. I wish that had got washed out with a late summer thunderstorm too.

Here is how the story goes:

Boy meets girl.
Girl has different expectations of relationship.
Boy has different expectations of relationship.
But he makes out with her anyway because he is in Love. And for any Bollywood fans out there, there is even a group song and dance sequence with an animated cartoon birdie perched on Boy's shoulder. He has a Spring in his step, because he fell for Summer!

Girl says I told you so and gets married to someone else.
Boy keeps moping.
And moping.
And moping.
And moping.
And moping.
And thinks about all the oh-so-cute things (playing pretend house in Ikea?!) they did when they were together.
And then he mopes again.
And thinks again about all the oh-so-cute things they did when they were together.
And mopes.
And mopes.
And...zzzzz.
Oh sorry, I need to finish this neverending story, don't I?
One day he meets Girl again, and has the aha moment (he wasn't THE ONE!).
The End.

Friday, Friday at the FIP.

My favorite part of Friday is going to the breakfasts that are held by the Fitzpatrick Institute of Photonics (FIP, for short), of which our research group is a part.

Now, graduate researchers are a breed that are to be read, not to be seen. Who knew, or would believe, that our department for example, had more grad students than undergrads? They are hidden away in labs, offices and cleanrooms and such. But come Friday, two very diligent grad students put together a lovely spread of coffee, muffins, biscuits and fruits in the atrium, and magically, there is a crowd. Of grad students. And post doctoral researchers. And a few professors (who can get over themselves!).

Sure, some folks just come grab the grub and head back wordlessly straight to their offices. I have seen some students, and even a postdoc who pile up five plates of food, make three trips back and forth from their office, making arrangements for lunch, dinner and then breakfast for Saturday, without a word to the people around them. Then there is the other lot who don't even step out of their offices. The very thought of possible socializing seems to paralyze them and chain them to their desks.

As for the rest, the saner of the lot, for the ones who come and hang out, the atmosphere is light, the conversation refreshingly rambling. Sometimes a technical poster is displayed for discussion. It may just be an excuse for giving an academic sheen to a social get-together, but it is well worth it. And there are discussions. Once, we came up with a detailed outline for a technical poster to describe the etching of a macro-cavity in pulverized silicon dioxide (dig a hole in the sand, you bozo!)

45 minutes later, the place is empty, but it is a lovely start to the weekend.

"In recognition of

Lotstodo GradStudent's invaluable service to the community of American and world scientists by making lasers that
1. Saved the world
2. Made clean water available to all
3. Ended all hunger and poverty
4. Turned all 6.779 billion inhabitants into happy world-citizens
5. And most importantly, elevated the status of the lowly grad student to one of the mighty Atlas' who did not shrug ,

I, Barack Hussain Obama, President of the United States of America, by the powers vested in me by the constitution of the United States of America, confer upon Lotstodo GradStudent honorary citizenship of this country."



Wha....the....? After all the nightmares I have been having (heck, I am a graduate student, I am supposed to have nightmares!)...this dream was a refreshing change.

Addendum: So am I desperately looking to get American citizenship? Nope. Nope. It was only a weird dream, refreshing only because of its content, not that the outcome is a citizenship!

And so, what is YOUR name?

What would you do if a guy in a muscle shirt , with a most elaborately shaved pattern of scrolls and curls on his chin and sideburns, comes to you with a swaggering gait, points to the top button of his slightly frayed jeans peeping through a heavily ornate belt buckle, and say: "Look here, look here. What is your name?"

Scream for help?
Slap the man?
Pretend to be deaf and dumb and walk on?
Run in the opposite direction?

Looking at my (I imagine) ashen face, he turned and looked around, pointed to some string wound around a basket, and repeated: "Look here, look here. What is your name? Spanish?"

Aahaa, THREAD. This man, who just walked into this fabric store, only needs to buy some sewing thread.

Green is the new green

I was reading up a little about green laser diodes thanks to a news article that came through a professional discussion group, and lo and behold, I just find that Photonics Spotlight (check blog link on right) talking about the same topic.

Seems like periodically, there is a synergy of ideas regarding both fundamental science and applications, a convergence of efforts, a maturing of technology, and one then has the next "surge" in the field.

Of course, for the uninitiated, here green laser diodes refer to the color of light emitted, rather than the environmental aspect of it. But we know that semiconductor based lighting sources are head and shoulders above incandescents and CFLs in efficiency, so they indeed are green.

Groan

Why do some men have to grunt and groan at 92 decibels doing their bench presses?
And then walk around strutting their stuff?

2 bench presses followed by a half-hour strut through the weight room.
That don't impress me much.

At my desk, in my chair, hello computer!

Just like Phaedrus fears water, I fear computer simulations. I don't hate it, I just fear it.

And competing with that are the following fears:
1. Fear of feeling unproductive, aka, I haven't made a real device in the cleanroom in the last 4 weeks.
2. Fear of not having real data by testing a real device.
3. Fear of not being able to get anything useful out of the simulations in a short amount of time.
4. Fear of disappointing the Big Boss by not being able to get anything useful out of the simulations in a short amount of time.
5. Fear of not comprehending why the heck these simulations seem to behave the way they do.

I am happy to report that I have temporarily overcome some of these fears and have been tied to my desk and chair for 8-10 hours a day like millions of people who earn their bread by staring at a computer screen, and rediscovered a few things:
1. Ha, I don't have to necessarily wear long trousers to protect my legs, because I am not going to the clean room. It sure makes a variation in my daily (imaginary) fashion statement. I remember last year, when I was going through a similar simulatory phase at least 3 colleagues who I do not talk to on a regular basis stopped to ask me why I was wearing a skirt (!!).
2. Suddenly, numerous people seem to complement me on my "new" hairstyle, aka "not tied up and pressed flat against the scalp like Princess Leah". Courtesy, the same as above.
3. Telecommute, aka the joy of working wearing your PJs. Unfortunately, PJs are also very conducive to plopping on the bed and going off to sleep in the middle of the day when you are frustrated with the (non) results of your computer simulation.

How are the simulations going, you may ask? Uh, I'll let you know after I have napped a bit.

"Back" up

Piyali is in UK right now, and too much of sightseeing = back pain and sciatica, and extreme pain during any change in movement: standing up, turning, walking. I have seen her living with daily excruciating back pain for the past 15 years. The diagnoses have been many: slipped disc, osteoperosis, and a crazy number of others. Tractions, exercising, vitamin D injections, and what not, seem to have no effect. The primary treatment other than surgery for her seems to be exercise to keep the back flexible and reduce weight, but how does one do that if one can hardly stand? Lower back pain is one of the most common ailments out there, and the number of therapies that are present are mindboggling. But equally suspicious are the rates of success, the side effects, the temporary nature of the treatments in some cases.
Recently, I came across a unique back pain website, which seems to clear up at least some of the myths around back pain. While I am not yet sure what will work for Piyali, at least I have a better idea of what will not work. For example, I had no idea that chiropractic school was such a huge sham. Not that I have ever been to a chiropractor (we don't really have an equivalent of this in India), but the extent to which many of them are ill-trained and ill-equipped is scary.
On the other hand, I am hoping to see more about the efficacy of ozone discectomy in a future post , which interestingly, is available in India but still not in the States.
Maybe some form of discectomy or an epidural that would allow pain relief for a few months for her to get started with an exercise regimen maybe in order. Kal, my friend who is a physical therapist suggested this. Wierd, but I don't know why no doctor till now has suggested that, and it seems like a really good idea.
So currently I am on a mission to find out more and hopefully, help Piyali work with a doctor in a more informed way when she gets back to India.

Ironically, the way I keep my back in shape is by doing the yoga exercises Piyali taught me. Since she is an artist, I have nice figure drawings for each of the asanas, so I don't forget how they are done. And she can't do them because she is in too much of pain.

Plants

Are uncontrolled experiments. Too many unknown variables (Water, soil, drainage, nutrients, pot size, insects, temperature, species, mood...! ) in too complex a system composed of too many parts and too many materials and chemicals (it is a Plant).

It is comforting that I have better control in the clean room. Known, controlled variables of humidity, temperature (and you name it) in a simple system, heck, a simple element (silicon!) or compound (Gallium Arsenide).

But if my plant starts dying, I can look up the Internet for tips to further try to manage this complex system. If the device I make dies, I scratch my head. And scratch my head. Gardeners across the world are smarter than this PhD student.

'Lazy' days of summer

Summer goes too fast, and when Phaedrus is in town, the speedometer breaks.
Last week we did the following, in the stated chronological order:
Work, visit friends for dinner, work, watch Ice Age : Dawn of the Dinosaurs in 3D.
Work, visit the Eno River Festival and get our caricatures drawn, work.
Work, go to an American Dance Festival concert and watch a drag performance of Beyonce's All the Single Ladies, played an hour of Table Tennis.
Work, listen to the Army Jazz band on Corcoran Street, visit a Hindu temple and unexpectedly attend a Satyanarayan Puja, watch Howards End (quite a jump from pious Hindu godly thoughts).
Work, go to the mall and buy supplies from Target for a weekend-out-of-town trip, work.
Work (and finally get experimental results and submit a grant proposal....in two separate unrelated events), experience the Duke Immersive Virtual Enviroment cube, go to Target to finish shopping, go to Dain's Place with friends.
Drive to the Outer Banks, mull over the genius of the Wright brothers, beach around, watch "The Lost Colony", an outdoor drama in its 72nd year, wonder how many lakhs/crores of rupees would be needed to start and run an outdoor theater in India.
Climb up the shifting sand dunes of the Jockey's Ridge State park (is it the beach, or is it a desert?), climb up the 268 steps to the top of the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse (and NOT pant, Hurray!), go the the Graveyard of the Atlantic museum (the museum is pretending hard to not be a Graveyard.) Take the ferry to Ocracoke, beach around.
Go parasailing at 1200 feet (that was it?), watch a Kite Flying festival, drive back from the Outerbanks, eat substandard garlicky Indo-Chinese food for the umpteenth time (we never learn), watch a crappy Bollywood movie while burping out garlicky burps.

Pass out.

Very Difficult

To believe in the inherent good in people.
Aren't some just born evil?

Light

...at the end of my laser converted into bits, captured, stored, backed-up, plotted, graphed and printed out. It works. It works.

A silver, or in this case, infrared lining, to a dark cloud is always a good thing.

More Excuses

It's raining cats, dogs and thunderstorms, and I already got drenched once.
So, biking will have to wait for sunnier days.

No excuses left

The cat's eye is installed
The rear reflector is now set.
The batteries are charged.
Tire pressure seems right.
The ambient temperature is conveniently 76 degrees.
The sun makes me squint just the right amount.

No excuses left,
To ride my bike.

Envying the plants on the other side of the fence

Why, oh why,
Do I want a garden so green?
I turn green looking at my neighbor's garden,
And my garden turns brown with shame.

Depressed Bird/ Dumb Bird? Suicidal Bird!

My colleague A- and I, walking from one building to another on-campus, came across a bird. Sort of looked like a pigeon, but we weren't sure. A sitting duck would be a more apt description.

It was on the road, leaning against the edge of the side walk. We walked a foot past it, and it did not budge. Both A and I noticed it, but it did not register in my head till A- said...Woah that is one calm bird. So we stopped. A- touched Bird, but it did not seem to care. No shaking, no palpitating chest.

A- and I circled it twisting our heads this way and that. Was it injured? Was it pregnant? Was Bird suffering from mid-life crisis? Maybe it was just lazy. Maybe it had brain surgery done to it in the lab next door, and had escaped. There were no signs of injury. Very strange. Maybe Bird was just sick, maybe just ate too much for lunch and couldn't move (I know that happens to Phaedrus, but he is human). I also nudged it a bit, and I could swear it gave me a look of utter boredom.

I tried to call a friend who knew about birds (same brain surgery lab ), but couldn't get through, so we were like...okay, guess there is nothing we can do. Sorry, Bird.

Just at that moment, a truck Roared past it. Barely 2 feet away. In fact, we quickly jumped on the sidewalk because we saw the truck coming. Bird did not Move. Not an inch. This Bird was dimwitted ! A crazy, suicidal Bird! That was it. I started pestering A- to pick up Bird from the road and put it on the sidewalk. Since it appeared that I was more scared to pick it up than he was, he agreed.

A- goes and puts his hand on Bird and about to pluck it off the ground, when it takes off and flies away, like any normal self-respecting Bird.

What a birdbrain.

Fighting with Uncle Sam

It took two PhD students a cumulative of 10 hours to Not complete a federal tax return and two state tax returns over the weekend. Phaedrus and I have to file joint state tax returns for 2 states as we are residents of 2 different states, and North Carolina tax instructions are umm, not very clear. So much so, that even TurboTax did some totally whacky calculations and confused us for another 3 hours. How did that get THAT fraction?...we tried every permutation and combination, till we figured that it had got it wrong as well.

After having taken turns nudging each other awake from falling asleep over the forms, we finally called it quits at 4.00 in the morning, broken and defeated by Uncle Sam. Phaedrus, exhausted, cursing my home-state, had a sound, dreamless sleep; I saw line instructions and arithmetic all night. I woke up and zombied over to the computer and tax forms blindly staring at them for another hour first thing in the morning, before Phaedrus came to check if I had died or something sitting in my chair.

Hilarity

After a colleague announced to others in a meeting today that I have a "hilarious" blog, I am forced to fulfill the adjective describing this blog. Here goes.

Playing to the Gallery

Surely you do not think me to be a bad piano
A bad piano throws up when one bangs down on it
I only sputter.

You say, I am off-tune?
Is that your fault or mine or his?

On the other hand, I think you shouldn't sit where you are, up there.
Forcing me to be louder to reach your discerning ears.
I am an instrument, you know,
Not a vocal chord.

On the other hand, vocal chords strain more than I am straining.
What would you do then, compare them to a bad piano?
Like me?

Sob.

Invisibility

You may have heard the news of the cloak.

The cloak - more recently made famous by a privately wealthy school where Harry and the Romulans studied electromagnetics in 400 AD. The school is known for its legendary cigar smoking statue….. captured with its Hogwartian backdrop only in brochures and tourist-clicked photographs. On clear windless days, it is more likely for the statue to be found cloaked by a dimpled brownish orange bouncing sphere, with no wings, and thin black lines drawn across it. The beauty of this sphere, without the color and the dimples, is that it is the focal point of the diagrams explaining how the cloak works…using the black lines to great bending effect.

Surprisingly, the inventor does not have a mane of wild wavy hair and a tongue sticking out. He does not have a cigar, in spite of the tongue not sticking out. He does not have a scraggly white beard and bushy eyebrows, to draw inattention to the fact that his tongue is not sticking out. Why?

But his other-world non-Romulan pate radiates a disconcerting aura of

The Baking Soda that Baked a Bitter Bread

Today, two loaves of bitterly bitter banana bread later, I discovered that baking powder and baking soda are two entirely different, non-interchangeable ingredients. The recipe called for 3.5 tsp of baking powder, and I put in 3 tbsp of baking soda. Wrong ingredient, wrong quantity.

The bread texture is great, it just tastes like it was soaked in neem juice.

So for all ye beginner bakers, here is a rule:
Short cooking times (pancakes and cookies) need baking soda , which is purely sodium bicarbonate.
Long cooking times and high heat, Breads and cakes, need powder, which is a mixture of sodium bicarbonate and cream of tartar. Sodium bicarbonate dissociates pretty fast...and then the cream of tartar takes over.

short and sweet need soda
breads and cakes need powder.


The larger question is what do I do with all this lovely looking, ugly tasting bread?

Crime and Punishment

The crime of rhyme:
there are only so many.
The curse of its verse:
the jails of deja vous.

Burnt Green Postcards

Burnt green postcards

I am sending postcards that are going
all over the world,
asking: what shall become of our dream?
When the army of hollow half-cuboidal horsemen
prepare to war with regimented rectangular footsoldiers;
and all that will be left are tree stumps
of burnt sienna
and dried brick-red blood;
when leaf green and sky blue
will all turn to charcoal black?

Maybe then, you cool dude
with your cool swagger and
cool cheap plastic sunglasses
will freeze and think
why you’ve always put
that 100% compostable and fully renewable cup
in the trash.

And you, miss fake thinker,
in perfect pose for a portrait photo
will move and uncomfortably sigh:
neither did I.

And I,
A de-clawed tiger
A de-olfactorized dog
A blinded vulture,
will smash into these empty spaces
bathed in paraboloids of jaundiced yellow,
and wait and wait
for a timid teal, tapir or tadpole
to come splashing down these
meandering ways again.