Mayawati for PM!

Go Maya go!

If BJP distributes ‘Friends of BJP’ button for bloggers, why not Mayawati?

Yes! We want Mayawati for PM! Go Maya go!

On why being a doctor is hard

Disclaimer: This is certainly NOT laughing at others problems. This is just plain humour.

Credit: The credit for this post goes to Maulvi Ballboy (who refuses to be linked) and I condemn his laziness in blogging this.

I have always thought that being a doctor is super hard. One – it needs an awful lot of hard work. Imagine being made to study for four and a half years after your 12th standard followed by one year of work, then preparing for one or two years for your post graduate specialization to find that almost 2 lakh people fight like crazy for 2000 odd seats. Even after that, you have no idea of where you are headed towards. Boy-o-boy, no wonder it is hard. Can anyone rant better than Spunky Monkey about medical school?

Well, now we know that it is hard, let me tell you why it is very hard from my view. Certainly not that, I could have studied books which weigh more than I do but still…

Imagine a patient who limps and comes. For someone who is addicted to Monty Python, the first thing that comes to your mind is silly walk. Isn’t it?

Imagine you are a doctor and say he comes to your clinic and starts off:

Patient: Hello doctor.

Doctor: Hello. Please come in. Take your seat.

Patient: Thank you doctor.

Doctor: Now, tell me. What is your problem?

Patient: My balls are swollen.

Now, as a doctor you are supposed to enquire as to how it happened, why it happened and the previous case history and every detail to do with his balls and its ambience. Tell me, how can you not laugh at this? Had I been the (evil) doctor, I would have said ‘Is your first name Chris? Are you the reporter from Southpark whose name is Chris Swollenballs?’.

I can go on and on…

As a doctor, he/she is supposed to control his or her laughter and ask for more details. Isn’t it uber-hard to control laughter and ask for more details? Oh God, life of a doctor is hard!

Advanced degree in the US

It has been a long time since I posted on this blog. Procrastination and other things that one does in the final semester of his undergraduate life have made this blog taken a backseat.

Before you call this post a case of ’sour grapes’, let me make it clear, that I have a graduate student position with full tuition fee waiver and a Teaching Assistantship from a top tier university. I have also been wait-listed by a university in the east coast. As someone whose IQ is the logarithm of some of the better guys’ IQs in this village, I have come to realize the fact that I should not take my success too seriously nor feel bad over the bunch of rejects I got. I have started to believe that this whole system of admissions to the US universities is more or less a stochastic process.

There is a chain of a lot of silly things over the course of this whole process. Let us not talk about the farce called Graduate Record Examination or the come-on-I-will-drive-an-insomniac-to-sleep TOEFL. Let us head directly to the process of applying.

1. Statement of Purpose: Portray yourself next to Einstein. Talk about the set of simultaneous equations you solved on MATLAB and portray yourself to have cracked the answer to life, universe and everything.
2. Recommendations: Write your own recommendations. Get your lecturers from Underwear Institute of Technology to write recommendations as ‘He has great moral ethics. He will be the best guy who can ever get to work under you’. A professor whom I met at Switzerland told me that Indian professors write recommendations talking about his personal qualities which are of little importance to him.
3. It certainly does not matter what grades you have. You can bluff on your CV and SOP stating that you are excellent and get away with it.

As long as you are ready to be a cash cow to the university, I don’t really think you need to bother. You are in.

I was surprised when I get to hear a significant number of my friends who had applied to PhD in universities ranging from good to excellent (namewise, area of researchwise) getting rejects in scores. Most of them have great grades, good undergraduate research experience, at least a conference publication and I would say good recommendations. What was more surprising is people with lesser grades, no publications, recommendations almost similar and undergraduate research experience in the form of internships – here lies the difference – in big labs got in with funding in the form of fellowships to almost every place they applied to. I have increasingly observed that more than anything on your CV, it is networking which helps. If a student is able to network pretty well by visiting campuses before the decisions are out – just like a fraudulent reptilian classmate of mine did, you can even go to Mars for graduate school.

This leads me to a question for which I haven’t been able to get convincing answers: Is this whole system of applying to graduate school for smart asses who can get around and impress people with grandiose plans or is it for students who have a genuine interest in research?

Do leave a comment if you have anything to say.

Indian PhD thesis

Arunn is appalled at the standards of thesis writing in India.

The above is a representative sample page of a Ph. D. thesis I am correcting. It requires English language correction. That is fine with me, as me and some of my students are not born with an English tongue. We only have our mother tongue. Unfortunately, the sample above shows also lack of basic understanding of the entrusted research – after four years through the degree.

My bad, I presume.

Read the post here.

As an afterthought, is there no way to improve the standards of education in India? Money is certainly not an issue. PhD students in India get atleast Rs. 15000 per month (approx. $300). Compare it with the case in Russia. PhD students get 500 roubles (approx. $20) per month (As far as I know from a couple of my friends/collaborators). And everyone knows the standard of research in Russia. Is there any way out for Indian science?

New prestigious journals

Here are links to two prestigious journals.

The Journal of Unpublished Results

The Journal of Weird-Ass Shit

Here is a link to a paper accepted in JWAS.

El Naschie revolution in HEP

I was cursing myself for not having been alive during Annus Mirabilis till I read about a gentleman called Prof. Dr. Mohamed El Naschie via Quantum Pontiff.

Professor El Naschie was trained initially as an engineer and worked extensively in Structural Engineering and Applied Mechanics. After becoming full Professor of Engineering he followed his inclination towards theoretical subjects and moved first towards Applied Mathematics and later on Nuclear and High Energy Physics. His research interests include: Stability, Bifurcation. Atomic-engineering, Nonlinear Dynamics, Chaos, Fractals, High Energy Particle Physics, Quantum Mechanics and E-infinity theory. He is editor-in-chief and associate editor of numerous learned journals.

I had heard of Chiranjeevi’s case from Abi’s blog. (No! Not the Telugu superstar Chiranjeevi for the uninitiated.). Of course, the Kundu case might still be fresh in your minds. Popular bloggers like Rahul and Abi had blogged about it. You can read it here, here and here.

For those of you who are working in the field of nonlinear dynamics, “Chaos, Solitons and Fractals” might be a reputed(?) journal. Here is a link by Dave Bacon aptly titled “Can’t Spell “Evil” without Elsevier” which is apparently the answer to the question – How do you publish 300 journal papers of craziness in an Elsevier journal?

Here is the answer:

El Naschie is editor in chief of the journal Chaos, Solitons and Fractals.  This journal is published by Elsevier, one of the biggest players in the science publishing business.

But here’s where things get interesting: this journal also lists 322 papers with El Naschie as an author!

Also, this guy is supposedly thought of a future Nobel Prize Winner in the Middle East especially in Egypt.

I know that many people are aware of the stuff. When Urs visited me last month I mentioned this during the lunch and he was well aware of the nonsense papers often published there. I contacted one influential Nobel prize winner who knows El Nashchie and told me that he can’t or does not want to do much about it, and this is not a big thing and so on. And I was informed of huge influence of that guy in some middle east countries, what is not an argument which should be cited by a person of Nobel prize standing, and I feel it insulting for the decency of discussion. I do not care if the person is powerful; I care if he is right or wrong.

I am quite shocked that Elsevier charges close to $4000 for this journal and it is in the A+ category in quality in the the list of Australian Academy of Sciences with high “impact factor” of 3.

What is more shocking is, the Wiki entry someone has put up has been deleted.

E infinity theory is a fractal cosmology model made by M. S. El Naschie beginning in 1994. This models a harmonic production of quarks and elementary particles through a golden section centered Cantorian fractal spacetime.

The crucial step in E infinity formulation was to identify the stormy ocean-like behavior of quantum spacetime with vacuum fluctuation and using the mathematical tools of non-linear dynamics, complexity theory, and chaos. In particular, the geometry of chaotic dynamics, namely fractal geometry, is reduced to its quintessence, (i.e., Cantor sets) and employed directly in the geometrical description of the fluctuation of the vacuum.

E infinity theory admits formally infinite-dimensional ‘‘real’’ spacetime. However this infinity is hierarchical in a strict mathematical way and is able to show that although E infinity has formally infinitely many dimensions, seen from a distance, i.e., at low resolution or equivalently at low energy, it mimics the appearance of a four-dimensional spacetime manifold which has only four dimensions. Thus, the four dimensionality is a probabilistic statement, a so-called expectation value. It is remarkable that the Hausdorff dimension of this topologically four dimensional-like ‘‘pre’’ manifold is also a finite value equal to the cube of golden mean (4,236…).

Before winding up this post, please do see this video on the internet posted by the proponent of E-infinity (No prizes for guessing! The links leads to that Elsevier journal.) theory with comments disabled on Youtube.

Meikapisms

There are specimens and then, there are Professors. Here is a hilarious blog post about a Professor’s brutal English.

PS: Read it at your own risk. Certainly not in the lab or office.

An open letter

Dear Pretty Young Thing Babe Hot Chick,

It is with deep anguish and hurt that I am writing you this e-mail. I thought you would understand my feelings and my procrastination, but feelings got over procrastination and here I am writing to you this letter.

Of late, I have observed that people who travel with me are real old people. You know those always snoring, CPI(M) supporting, Chinese national newspaper reading people. And yes, there is this other category of people who bring their kids in the train. Those really shrill voiced aunties who wake me up from my slumber in the upper berth and ask me to hold the all-night-crying kid’s nappy. Of course once in a while I come across engineering college graduates from Bangalore or Madras coming back home who wonder what an IITian’s brain is made of. Poor them! I respect all of them but I want to tell you that they don’t make nice co-passengers.

It has been a long time since I saw you. Everytime I hop on to the train, I make sure that I check out the names and vital statistics(if any)^[1] of F<27 not only in my compartment but also in other compartments. It used to be F<21 a few years ago but since I am old now, it is F<27. I have never seen you in the train though I have heard detailed stories about you being sighted in the train by some of my lucky friends. Why not me? Have I committed some heinous crime that I don’t get to see you?

I have a few questions: Do you belong to the bourgeois class? Do you always travel by AC? Don’t you ever travel by sleeper class? Unfortunately, my finances don’t allow me to travel by AC. I always travel by sleeper class.

At the very outset, I apologize for the not-so-properly-sounding analogy. Are you as enigmatic as the Himalayan animal yeti?

I have only ideas as to how your looks are. I don’t expect you to be like this. Not like this also. I know it is too high an expectation. If not like this, at least like this.

Please do consider travelling by sleeper class. If you are concerned about your safety, please do not worry. You have the chivalrous me to take care of you. I shall make sure that the upper berth is made available for you if you are bothered about your safety. Please travel in sleeper class from now on. I shall be graduating by May 2009 and have two or three more sleeper class trips. After that, I might only travel by air. I hereby request you to be my co-passenger once before I graduate from this damned ghetto.

Thanking you in advance.

Affectionately,

Jatkesha

———————–

[1] – It was a joke. Laloo Yadav, please don’t take this seriously!

Logic?

Dear God, why on earth can’t people be logical? Why do they have to be illogical all the time?

cuisses de grenouilles

After a trip back home, it is back to ranting on my blog. Home is always fun even when there is no cable television, no internet and incessant rains that make you feel that walking is the biggest sin that you ever committed. Just with Granma of India, you can spend more than 3 to 4 hours and good food and excess dosage of sleep makes you feel that you are on top of the world! Talking with amma about some random topic, amma telling me about the various mischiefs I did as a child, irritating my brother, dad yelling for getting up too late saying that I am indisciplined……I can go on and on and on!

Well..that is not why the title of the post is an obscure French phrase which I found after Googling for a sufficient time. This place is famous for the wonderful cuisine they serve to its inmates. Even after 61 years of independence, we are still in the pre-independence mentality being fed royal food in one of the esteemed institutes of technology of the country reminiscent of the reputation of this place as an erstwhile kingdom. Here is a scholarly essay which shows the equipments which are used in cooking the delicacies.

Till now, I had only seen eclectic fish delicacies and the two legged gallus gallus (to be read in Latin and not as an affectionate nickname for your neighbour Gaurav Agarwal^[1]) on plate. But wait till I reach the crux of the post! As you all know, it is Olympics time. Beijing 2008 has been an Olympics to remember for reasons more than one. Phelps, Bolt^[2], India winning three medals in the Olympics and what not! No. That isn’t the issue here either. Have you ever heard of Chinese food? Not the Gobi Manchurian and chopsuey you hog on to! Neither the stinky tofu you have eaten! Well, I will spare you the description and let you in on a little secret. See this for yourself!

When the whole world is celebrating by serving Chinese delicacies, how can this esteemed institute be left in the lurch? Isn’t it below prestige for the #1 institute in the country not to have something to its credit?

(Chorus shouts) EET EEJH! EET EEJH!

So, the wonderful cooks who are generally promoted from sweepers to cooks and are given a BHM degree^[3] decide to dish out a French delicacy. But, how do we do it without giving it an Indian twist? Remember, we are the people who are very proud of ‘Made in India’? Remember that everything has to be Indianised! So, how do we cook cuisses de grenouilles the Indian way?

Solution: Put the grenouille in the elixir for South Indians, sambhar. This is how it looks like:

Grenouilles sambar

Are you interested in cooking this Franco-South Indian delicacy? Please contact this erstwhile prison-cum-kingdom which is currently the beacon of technical education in this country!

Three cheers to IIT Kharagpur for serving French delicacies!

Related link: What’s cookin’?!

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[1] – Gaurav, Abhishek and Kunal is a placeholder in Hindi for multiple unspecified people just like Tom, Dick and Harry is.

[2] – Heard of the joke ‘Nut screws washers and bolts!’? Did Bolt do that?

[3] – BHM also means Bachelor of Hotel Management.