Monday, February 19, 2007

Comic

There is this cartoon faced Chinese student in the TA office. He had pulled together three or four chairs and was sleeping across them rather early on a cloudy Monday morning. As i took a turn to head to my seat, i found myself standing directly in front of his foot, and in his immediate line of sight. Since he opened his eyes and was stairing like a frightened cat into mine, i thought i'd make small talk. So i started off with, " Been working rather hard this weekend?", to which he earnestly replied, after a slight delay to jerk himself out of his stupor, "No, i feel tired because of the rainy weather."

In the evening on this same day, i was in my apartment talking to my new roomie. I asked him about his plans for spring break, and suggested that he might go to his sister's place in Denver when he said he'd made no plans. To this he responded in all seriousness, "No, i don't want to go to my sister's place now. We have bed bugs here, and if i go there i'm sure to take them with me. I don't want to trouble my sister with bed bugs, so i don't think i'll go now. May be in summer, if the bed bugs in our apartment are gone by then."

Its now night on that very same day and raining outside as i write this. Somehow everyone seems to be in a mood to make me laugh today. I was correcting the lab reports of one of my senior undergraduate students. It was a lab on X-ray diffraction, and in the discussion section, under sources of error he writes:
The results above support the idea that this lab was not without many possible sources of error such as a bad sample[full-stop] after all the groups never saw or touched the sample until the day of the experiment,[should have been full-stop] the XRD could have been out of tune[full-stop] after all the one next to it was being serviced which may have also caused some intereference.

1) LOL at his imagining the samples desoiling themselves because the students hadn't touched them.
2) ROTFL at his conception of sisterly concern among XRD machines! =))

All this from a senior undergraduate! :-|

Saturday, February 10, 2007

A favour.

shoot the vain peacock,
or smash his head against a rock,
he'll be grateful to you,
and you'll reach heaven without ado

Friday, February 09, 2007

Thought processes.

The elements in each row are equivalent, and the rows are listed in descending order of the extent to which they stultify thought processes:

1) Video,real life and music.
2) Pictures and conversation.
3) Text and radio.

Many might refute 1), but those elements reduce in stultification power only by repetition. The fractional effect of repetition in wearing away the stultification power decreases from row 1 to row 3.

Wednesday, February 07, 2007

Good old youth.

Too many youth in their twenties complain of feeling old these days. I don't think its due to any excess of wisdom in them. Its just a consequence of over expectation, or excessive ambition, and its entailing, overwork. This leads to nervous fatigue, and a general disinterest in things they deem 'useless', hence making them feel morbidly bored when they don't have work assigned to them. This makes them weary, and combined with the nervous dystrophy makes them feel old.

P.S: This post is meant for me to save my thoughts. I don't have the patience to create a private blog now just because a handful of people will be reading this post. So I've disabled the comment option instead.