Here is a news story from yesterday's ToI:
"On Wednesday evening, visiting Japanese PM Yoshihiko Noda had a special guest at his dinner with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh: Dhanush (Rajnikanth's son-in-law), the current rage after his sensational hit, kolaveridi, the Tinglish number that has gone viral on the internet and spawned dozens of copycat versions. Most important, it's now hot property in night clubs and discos throughout Japan. If the humorous lyrics and Dhanush's evident enjoyment of his song made the video go viral in the cyberspace, the equal enjoyment of disco-goers in Tokyo has added to the song's international appeal...."
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Note that 'viral' occurs twice in that short para. One is followed by 'internet' and the other by 'cyberspace' which is the same thing. Online-Webster has this entry for viral:
"quickly and widely spread or popularized especially by person-to-person electronic communication"
I guess this use of 'viral' has its pre-net origin in computer 'viruses'. The history of computer viruses, as expected, goes back to John von Neumann (1949), when neither computers nor their viruses were prevalent.
In 1987, Ed Taylor of MIT sent me two huge floppy disks having the just-developed Spacetime Software. And our Diro Professor KLC came to know of it and ordered me to work on them...he didn't care to know that the Phy Dept then hadn't heard of IBM PCs. It was rumored that ME had the Adam & Eve version called PC XT which had no hard drive but only two slots for those diskettes. My friend and Electronics Guru, BKM (now Dean), had access to one and allowed me 'time' on his private PC.
A year later, I took TRR as my Project Student to work on the topic and gave copies of the Software in his floppies. He came to my room one day and said they were not working. I called BKM and sent TRR to him with his problem. I was desperately worried, but BKM came to my room with TRR and said that his floppies got infected by a virus and he deleted it with his antivirus software.
The whole thing was a mystery to me; but I loved the term 'virus' as applied to computers and still love it; because, like Thurber, I have this picturesque mind, and for days on end I was visualizing TRR's floppy as a sick patient approaching BKM who gave it a shot in the arm and rubbed it with his hand and cleaned his hands in the kitchen sink with soap and water and dried his hands with that turkey towel...
Much later, when RSS used to visit my room early in the morning, and when I asked why he wasn't closeted with his online Hindusthan Times, he would say ruefully: "Kya batavoon, virus ghus gaya!"
I suppose virus does spread like wildfire but it has a limited lifetime since it kills itself but is not killed by anyone else. I am told most antiviral drugs are palliative but not curative and treat only side-effects..."untreated cold lasts SEVEN days while treated cold lasts only a week".
But not computer viruses...they have very specific antidotes, I am told, and can kill computers if early treatment is neglected. Maybe one day some software geek will come up with 'computer fungi'...fungal infections are nasty as you know. I had one such that oozed and troubled me for forty years responding only spasmodically to even cortisone unguenta. It got cured once for all by a single application of a couple of drops of Antibactrin (the cheap Bengali shelf remedy) that is nothing but mustard oil and tulsi perhaps.
And computer AIDS? And computer Sugar? And computer Heart Attack? And computer Parkinson's and Alzheimer's? And computer Cirrhosis? And last but not the least, Love Sickness?
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Men Swear by Menswear
My son has about 20 pants and 40 shirts in his wardrobe, most of them bought in America (Made in Asia). He changes his shirt everyday but pants once a week. I suppose his colleagues see only the upper garment and are thrilled and call him a well-dressed male. Torso Effect? He would prefer to wear no underwear at all...but you know...he is persuaded gently after his marriage...marriage has this 'civilizing effect' on males.
I have about 10 pants and 20 shirts, all gifted by my son. I wear only 2 pants and 2 shirts (the uppermost in the heap). Each outfit lasts for about 3 weeks. That is because nowadays I wear them only for ten minutes a day...go down in the lift, sit in the car, drive to the chai buddy, drive back home and hang the things on their peg behind the bedroom door. But I sweat a lot even in Hyderabad and change banians every two hours...I have 20 high-class Tirupur banians and use and throw ten of them in the washing machine every night.
I guess I am better-dressed.
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Mario Livio
After reading my blog: Tinkering, I got this mail from my cousin GMK:
"Thanks for immortalising me !
Try to get hold of the following books written in a delightful fashion, by Mario Livio, an Astrophysicist. (I am assuming you have not yet read them):
1. Is God a Mathematician ?
2. The equation that couldn't be solved
3. The Golden Ratio
gps: I haven't read Livio...where is the time now for reading?
http://gpsastry.blogspot.com/2010/07/read-or-write.html
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1 comment:
They have also beautiful names..
The deadliest which infected my PC
was called `Trojan'.
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