Science Day-Dream

Composed after dreaming on this Science Day that the Heavens displayed the straight edge pattern in place of the routine rainbow:


Fresnel Diffraction
Earthly distraction;
Telescopes,
Microscopes
Revel in her Fraun'fer cousin

DC does it again!

....RAW, on Friday flown in a key terror suspect involved in the recent serial bomb blasts secretly, reports our correspondent. ...:DC Front Page News Item, Hyderabad, Saturday, 28th February 2009.


A comma after bomb blasts
Would prevent terrorists
Work in secret,
Perhaps regret;
And Assist RAW in its airlifts!

A comma here, a comma there
Deccan Chronicle couldn't care;
In English, a foreign tongue,
Unlike in our mother tongue
Punctuation is a Big Bugbear!

Wodehouse

For 'turn of the phrase'
None can beat
P. G. Wodehouse!

James Thurber

Frugal, in line and word,
Splendid, in sense and sound,
I adore him
By day, by night.

Mark Twain

Paid by word,
Master of the short word,
Made $ 3 for 1
using
'putting it off'
for
'procrastination'

Streets of Hyderabad

I love her streets
Carts full of fruits
Highs
And Lows
Hoods with dbl slits

Oliver Wendell Holmes

Wit?
Just a twist..
Poet?
Great Gift!
Blend..
You get:
Oliver Wendell Holmes

MS Word

Some love birds
Some; curds
The Wit
..Just
Loves Words

Obama bans Outsourcing!

With apologies to Late Raj Kapoor:


Mera Jootha hai yeh Cheeni
Yeh Pathloon Hindusthani
Sar pe Peele Topee Brazili
Phir bhi Dil hai Mike Obami!

Celebrating Silver Jubilee

Trevera? Innova?
Skoda? Indica?
Benz?
Matiz?
Maruti Wah Wah!

Curiosity kills Beauty?

Rain, in Spain,
Sun and Newton;
What Ho!
Rainbow!
But why Deg. 41?

It took 3 decades to figure out a precise answer to satisfy poor ME!

The Answer:

Because at that angle,
Deviation is minimal,
Refracted rays are parallel,
When vision is 'Normal',
The eye lens gathers them all!


The answer,my friend,
As in life,
Is worse
than the riddle!

Old Man and the ME!

Pity the Old One
Very like ME
All teeth gone
Very like MINE
But I have pension
He has NONE!

Slapstick

Limerick
If it's quick
Suits ridicule
Weapon of a Failure
Pick stick and flick!

The Lowly Lovely Limerick

What brings a smile to my lips
Ought to lift up your spirits
The Art
The Craft
Lies in lowly Limericks

Humanity's secret longing

Some love Vanity
Others prefer Sanity
But at heart
...At last
We all value Dignity.

Cancer is kind....to some!

Jade Goody;
She looked rowdy,
As she dies
Everyone cries
Except Reality TV!

Wit's weaponry

Some fume and fumble
Others fight and tumble
The Wit
Would twit
And love to dissemble.

Hyderabadi Bargains

He says 80, I smile;
And then 70, I scowl;
50, he beckon;
30, deal's done;
And yet I feel a fool!

Flip side of Computing

The Generations of digital computing:

Gen 1 blew up Nagasaki
Gen 2 did in World Economy
Now comes Gen 3
"Cloud" Computee
Will he finish off Humanity?

Amen!

He came, he saw, he smiled

Lincoln climbs down his pedestal to watch Obama take oath:


His dream come true
He dropped down to view
When on his Bible
The novice did fumble
He smiled and withdrew.

Chinthal Basthi

When the heart is in susthi
And the mind needs masthi
For a riot of colors
Sounds and flavors
Take a stroll in Chinthal Basthi

Do's and Don'ts for Old and Young

Older folks ought not ogle
Lest their eyes goggle and boggle
But old and young
Queen and King
All of us ought to Google!

What a fall for the land of Geisha!

Japan, the Land of Geisha
Courtesy in Vesh-Bhasha
What a fall
Facing All
Its minister caught in Nisha!

Iswat, Sawat or Swathu?

Composed after listening to various Local Channels covering the turmoil in SWAT:


English in our Democracy
Has its own Autocracy:
SWAT is Iswat here
Sawat or Swathu there
Ours seems a Plutocracy!

Perils of being proudly semi-literate in Bengalee

Shyamal is tickled pink by this true story, circa 1965:


Dangerous indeed is half-knowledge:
Nudging in Calcutta's surge-surge-surge
Pining for the plush airport at Dum-Dum
Double words on buses being very very seldom
Semi-literacy led us to the sludgy Budge-Budge!

Nehru - Jinnah Conundrum

Yesterday I saw a couple of weird TV grabs which took me back to Nehru and Jinnah: both Westernized lawyers, instinctively secular and irreligious, power-hungry inimical politicians who wrote this country's modern history.

Both of them would have shuddered at these pictures; but perhaps compromised for staying in power...I hope I am not too harsh on the Chacha of one nation and the Father of the other...warring and sparring till Eternity...

Nehru's shudder: "A smiling Advani, clad in a saffron headgear, ceremonially unsheathing a sword gifted to him".

Jinnah's shudder: "A slim lady, fully veiled in black but for a creepy slit revealing a couple of hazel eyes, speaking fluently in British English, defending Sharia and the Taliban".

.......But Advani fell in love with Jinnah lately and got into hot waters...

Would Nehru have fallen in love with the 'hazel-eyes' and got into cold waters?

Bloggers Anthem

Hail Blogosphere!
All are welcome here
You may have little to say
Still you can say it here

Other spheres are round
But this one is profound
Empty your heads here
They will be lost and found

This is the beauty of our Blogosphere
A cat can wink at a king here
And like his Cheshire forebear
Grin, delete and disappear!

For truly this is the Wonderland
Alice and Tompkins would understand
Gamow meets his Carroll here
Prose and Verse hand in hand!


Others publish and perish
Here you post and cherish
Till the Net weaves its Web
You stay here and flourish

Hail Blogosphere
You are welcome here!

Pratik catches Blogospherinza!

Pratik takes his potshots:


There was a poet called Shakespeare,
Who wrote a tragedy named `King Lear',
Never dreamt of in his philosophy,
Quoting him Chakrabarti and Sastry,
Fighting over Blogosphere after 400 year!



Was it in King Lear of Shakespeare?
Or it was in `Nonsense' of Edward Lear?
Forget history O dear!
For you mustn't fear,
Writing one especially in Blogosphere!


Have a great GO!


Anonymous posts:

Steve Weinberg, returning from Texas,
Brings dimensions galore to perplex us,
But the extra ones all
Are rolled up in a ball
So tiny it seldom affects us.



gps responds:

Thanx for the lovely limerick
Here no need to be a maverick
This is a free sphere
None here need fear
You can throw a brick or stick!

Cat can wink at a king here...Indian Physics Innocence

Just now I read Dr. P. K. Iyengar's wonderful tribute to Homi Bhabha on his Birth Centenary.

A great tribute to a great Scientist and a born Leader!

But, this happened to recall some qualms I always had about what I call: "The Indian Physics Innocence".

....That was a lecture I attended in the S. N. Bose Seminar Room at IIT KGP. Dr. Iyengar was giving a wonderful talk on the topic of the day: "Cold Fusion". Great orator. Many skeptics questioned its feasibility. Dr. Iyengar snapped: "I have done Neutron Counting all my life, so I should know."

Cold Fusion was the supposed answer for our future energy needs..cheap and efficient...it went cold in no time...a crazy idea born abroad...crazy ideas are the stuff of science...e.g.: when everyone thought it was Radium, two dogged chemists (as I wrote elsewhere) insisted it was Barium; and the Bomb was born in 6 years....but such and such and so and so don't happen daily...

Then; our tech-savvy Rajiv Gandhi as P.M. was roped in as Chairman of another Nobel-winning thing: "High Temperature Superconductivity"...a cure for all energy losses; where has it gone?

And meanwhile someone said there is a "Fifth Force": and we went into deep pits to discover it...does it exist?

Indian Physics is very vibrant and colorful...but maybe a little innocent...

But, innocence that never hurt anyone; and maybe a day will come:"out of babes and innocents":

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Matthew 21:16: And said unto him, Hearest thou what these say? And Jesus saith unto them, Yea; have ye never read, Out of the mouth of babes and sucklings thou hast perfected praise?
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Surely I am not competent enough to criticize stalwarts : but this is the beauty of our Blogosphere...here a cat can look at a king;


Here we go again:

This is the beauty of our Blogosphere
A cat can wink at a king here
And like his Cheshire forebear
Grin, delete and disappear!

For truly this is the Wonderland
Alice and Tompkins would understand
Gamow meets his Carroll here
Prose and Verse hand in hand!

Hail Blogoshpere!
All are truly friends here.

Nervous Breakdown..take heart!

"Failed in business at age 31. Defeated for legislature at 32. Again failed in business at 34. Sweetheart died at 35. Had a nervous breakdown at 36. Defeated at election at 38. Defeated for Congress at 43. Defeated at Congress at 46. Defeated at Congress at 48. Defeated for Senate at 55. Defeated for Vice President at 56. Defeated for Senate at 58. Elected President at 60"....

Guess who? Abraham Lincoln:

http://www.squidoo.com/nervousbreakdown

I didn't know these details. I only read that, with Charlie Chaplin and William James (great company!), Lincoln too suffered a nervous breakdown and pulled through in those days when there was little medication and less understanding....

A deadly joke:

"Mrs. Lincoln, now; ahem.. apart from the shooting incident, how did you like the play?"

Hail Blogosphere!

Hail Blogosphere!
All are welcome here
You may have little to say
Still you can say it here

All spheres are round
But this one is profound
Empty your heads here
They will be lost and found

Others publish and perish
Here you post and cherish
Till the Net weaves its Web
You stay here and flourish

Hail Blogosphere
You are welcome here!


(to be continued indefinitely; you are welcome to contribute!)


----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Shyamal fumes:


Will this newly invented Blogosphere
Produce a Milton or a Shakespeare
Or a Dickens or James Joyce?
For blog is no melody but noise
For there are a million bloggers there.


-------------------------------

gps responds:


Shyamal's cross with our Blogosphere:
Can it cook up a Shakespeare?
Well, kitchens and loos have their use,
The Bard may love this Gloriousphere!



Let me quote from a respected source: http://www.poetry-online.org/limericks.htm


"...Limericks as a form of poetry has survived the test of time dating back for centuries! And whilst the poetic and literary skills of Shakespeare are not necessary for the composition of a limerick the great Bard himself did in fact write limericks which can be found in two of his greatest plays - Othello and King Lear"....

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Disclaimer: The distasteful word: 'Blogosphere' is not my invention. It has been listed in the online Webster: www.m-w.com since 2002:

blogosphere
One entry found.

Main Entry:
blog·o·sphere Listen to the pronunciation of blogosphere
Pronunciation:
\ˈblä-gə-ˌsfir\
Function:
noun
Date:
2002

: all of the blogs on the Internet as a collective whole
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Pratik takes his potshots:


There was a poet called Shakespeare,
Who wrote a tragedy named `King Lear',
Never dreamt of in his philosophy,
Quoting him Chakrabarti and Sastry,
Fighting over Blogosphere after 400 year!



Was it in King Lear of Shakespeare?
Or it was in `Nonsense' of Edward Lear?
Forget history O dear!
For you mustn't fear,
Writing one especially in Blogosphere!


Have a great GO!


Here we go again:

This is the beauty of our Blogosphere
A cat can wink at a king here
And like his Cheshire forebear
Grin, delete and disappear!

For truly this is the Wonderland
Alice and Tompkins would understand
Gamow meets his Carroll here
Prose and Verse hand in hand!

Hail Blogoshpere!
All are truly friends here.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Anonymous posts:

Steve Weinberg, returning from Texas,
Brings dimensions galore to perplex us,
But the extra ones all
Are rolled up in a ball
So tiny it seldom affects us.



gps responds:

Thanx for the lovely limerick
Here no need to be a maverick
This is a free sphere
None here need fear
You can throw a brick or stick!


-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Soggy Foggy Groggy Limerick

Somu has his Cosmology
And Pratik his Demo-gogy
They wrote a book
It has a great look
And cites my poor pedagogy


Dedicated to my younger colleagues Professors Somnath Bharadwaj and Pratik Khastigir

And indebted to Dr. Shyamal Chakrabarty (didn't do spell-checks) for this free-for-all art form...

Perverse Musings of a Past Physicist

1. You and I and all of us are the same age....about 15 billion years, give or take a billion...when the whole damn thing exploded with a Big Bang.

2. There is as little Physics in Metaphysics as there are bulls, bullets or tins in 'bulletins'.

3. Astrology is illogical...those who ply this trade are called: 'astrologers'; unlike biology, pathology, psychology, cosmology or even psephology.

4. Religion first gave us dignity; while Science said we were naked apes. Now, it is touch and go; mostly 'go'.

5. 'Blog' is not the ugliest word. Physics takes that cake for inventing a particle they named: 'Gluon'.

6. Life on the thin rind of this tiny planet around this tiny Sun around this tiny Galaxy around this Infinite Universe is but a freak accident...but doesn't mean it isn't sexy!

7. Obama is right...we need 'change'...for the better of course...; but, the Universe is expanding, cooling off and degrading without let.

8. They say our atmosphere is highly non-linear....a butterfly on my lawn deciding to flap its tiny wings could trigger a thunderbolt on the Everglades of Florida...or a lightning in my gloomy heart!

9. They say: 'East is East and West is West, the Twain shall never meet'. But, there is no East, nor West for a crazy seamless spinning sphere; only North and South; but do opposite poles attract?

10. The economy was liberalized and market flooded with UNCLE CHIPS; they cried foul: 'Give us silicon chips; not potato chips'. But, I can eat those, can they eat these? Waiting for 'bio-chip computing'... Dial, talk and EAT your cell phone!

11. All know that a spinning disk with colors on it looks white. Few know that a spinning disk with black and white looks colorful. It is all in the eye, not on the disk. Physiology is no more Physics than Sex is all Biology!

12. Computers go haywire when batteries go low. And brain goes haywire when Serotonin goes low. And brains go 'high' when Cocaine goes in. And computers come from brains...

13. First they said we are at rest and the Sun moves around us: 'Blind him...that heretic Galileo!'. Then Einstein said it is all the same: at rest or in motion; it all 'depends'... except those that 'spin', who are special. Now they say that most everything spins...those that make us up like electrons, protons and neutrons; and those we see and feel like photons and gravitons; even Black Holes that we don't see, but will surely feel if they pass us by.... That makes each of us special!

Ladies First....when Tiger Knocks!

The Blame Game has reached Physicists...rightly or more rightly!

It all started with Politics.

Till the Second World War, ordinary Physicists had little to do directly with Politics.

Then came the discovery of Nuclear Fission, essentially by two dogged German Chemists, from where Physicists took over. And then Hitler and the Second World War. And fears that Hitler was on the verge of bullying the great German Theoretical Physicist Heisenberg into building the first ever Atom Bomb (wrong nomenclature and wronger fear, as it turned out).

War breeds fear. And St. Einstein was roped in to convince Roosevelt that he better outdo Hitler. And then, all the Physicists of the Free World were herded into the forlorn desert sands of New Mexico to build the first ever Bomb.

And then the US Military took over and then Hiroshima.

And then the Cold War.

"For the first time", it was said, "Physicists have known Sin".

And then came the Military-Industrial Complex which ran the US economy; and everyone was hiring Physicists to use their talents for building more and more deadly weapons like Laser Bombs and precision guidance systems like the Global Positioning System (which uses the General Relativity of St. Einstein who would be turning in his grave to know that his 'innocent' theory is being put to military purposes).

Lots of Physicists refused to work for the Military. But many did...with good reason. When 'brains' and 'money' marry, half the offspring would be useful to Defense and the other half to 'Mankind'. Great inventions came up for everyday use...like the cell phone (used by terrorists for 'remote-timing' their bombs) and the MRI and PET for anyone who can afford them. And Nobel Prizes in Cosmology came from Bell Telephones Labs!

And the number of Physics Doctorates jumped by leaps and bounds. Theoretical Physics acquired an aura earlier reserved for Engineering and Medicine. They were all over the place.

Big Money made Physicists dream bigger. They got from the Government whatever they asked...billions of bucks to build costlier and costlier machines to test their pet theories of the Origin of the Universe and the Theory of Everything (known popularly as the String Theory).

But every dream run has an end. The Cold War came to a close and the US was looking inwards...and the all-wise US Congress stopped funding the Biggest Machine ever to be built, and spent their money in Health Care and Housing...

Ah!... 'There is the rub'..as Hamlet would say.

Without machines to test their theories, Theoretical Physicists were reduced to Dreamers.

The best of the brains pursuing String Theory were forced to look for other avenues of making a living and using their prodigious talents.

Then came the Greed of "Off-Shore Capitalism".

The buzz word everywhere was "Finance, Finance, Finance".

One of my most talented students working as a Theoretical Physics Professor at a renowned College of London told me that his Doctoral students asked him for problems involving not 'analytical work' but 'heavy computational work.' He was surprised and asked them why. Pat came the reply that they want a job in Banking and Finance since there is no future in Theoretical Physics!

One of my best students, after doing world-class work at Princeton and Berkeley in String Theory shifted to problems involving statistical models which the Investment Bankers needed badly.

My nephew who is a graduate in Mechanical Engineering holds a software job in a reputed Multinational Bank in Singapore. He said that their boss is a Theoretical Nuclear Physicist.

And then came the Doomsday for Investment Banking and the World Economy.

Nowadays I constantly read articles where the Global Bank Mangers are blaming their Theoretical Physics Employees for writing such inscrutable software programs that they can no longer read their Balance Sheets and; 'God only knows where our money went'.

Neither Obama nor Chidambaram looks like figuring out what exactly to do....

When Politics, Military and Greed run the system, why blame the poor Physics chaps?

"Physicists First....when Recession Knocks"!