Potpourri

With cooking comes cleaning. With playing games on the computer comes neck pain. With yummy delicious food come all the calories. With good Hindi movies come boring cacophonous songs. With watching a tennis game on the TV come commercials. With watching commercials come long soaps. With travel comes jet lag. With chocolates and toffees comes tooth ache. With teaching a course come paper corrections!

I used to burst a lot of crackers when I was a kid. The fireworks which make no sounds looked pretty. But when I was a kid, I never burst those. They were way too expensive and made no sound! That seemed rather counter-intuitive. We paid every buck for each decibel. Also, it was a sign of great courage among us kids to be able to burst crackers that made loud sounds. So we burst crackers like atom bomb (so we called it) or box bomb, sutali bomb, Lakshmi bar and Lawangi. We bought crackers a few weeks before Diwali, kept them in the sun. We believed that keeping crackers in the sun dried them and as a result helped them reach their highest noise making potential! On the first day of Diwali, we woke our neighbourhood up at 5:00am by bursting these loud monsters. And this make-loud-sounds-and-consider-that-the-biggest-fun-thing-in-the-world continued all through our Diwali vacation. Back then, we had a whole 20 days school leave for Diwali. What fun, we thought. Anyway, thankfully I ca...

Starting with a few basic sounds and symbols, developing many beautiful languages, literature, poetry and now back to abrupt shortening of long words and emoticons, man seems to have come a full circle!  Recently I came across a very interesting emoticon, called Facepalm. It has been described as follows: The gesture is found in many cultures as a display of frustration, disappointment, embarrassment,   shock, or surprise. ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facepalm) Here are some of my epic facepalm-worthy experiences: I treated some of my students to chai and samosas, and finally forgot to pay for it! (Turned out they paid!) *face-palm* Got locked outside my office with both the office keys inside! *face-palm* Called up a friend on her birthday, talked about this that and the other thing but forgot to wish her. Booked wrong air tickets. Realised immediately after making the payment. Forgot my laptop in a local train in Mumbai. Went for a class (to teach) o...

I had been using a microwave primarily to heat stuff. But I am out of LPG for the last two weeks and that has forced me to explore various functionalities of my microwave. Believe it or not, a chai (a strong Indian tea with tea powder and milk) made in a microwave comes out better than the one made on a gas stove. It retains the aroma of tea leaves and cleaning etc is much easier. My simple chai recipe is: add half a cup of water, half a cup of milk in a microwavable container. Place it on the turn table and heat it for 3 minutes. Add tea powder and sugar to this (1 tbs each or as per your requirements)  Add ginger or tea masala along with the tea leaves if you wish. Put a lid. Heat the container again for 2.5 minutes. Keep the lid for another minute. Filter the tea into a serving cup. This morning I was in a mood for a nice hot breakfast. I was bored of eating cereal every morning for the last two weeks! I decided to try to make pohe (flattened rice) in the microwave. To my own...

A few days ago I was listening to a lecture given by Shripad Dharmadhikari. He is an IITB alumnus, he has set up Manthan Adhyayan Kendra, a centre for research in energy and water related issues. He has also been associated with Narmada Bachao Andolan for around twelve years. Through his talk, he highlighted the energy crisis that India is doomed to face in another two decades or so. He mentioned that in another decade or so, no river in India will be flowing freely. That is, there will be dams, often cascaded dams, on every major river in India. Imagine the kids of next generation trying to find wild and wilderness in India! May be his estimates are not accurate, may be there are more than 3-4 decades before India energy crisis. However, his data and his description of the current state of affairs seemed very scary. Just hearing this made me rather depressed. I wondered how he manages to muster enough energy, courage and at the same time positive attitude every morning and keep worki...

Though one whole week of instructions is still to go before the end-sem exams begin, two out of three of my teaching days next week are holidays. (I am not complaining!) On Monday, which is the only day of my teaching schedule left in this semester, I plan to conduct a tutorial. So teaching is indeed over for this semester. As research now comes to the foreground, I thought I should mention something interesting I read. Recently I saw a Lemma by Eberfeld, Jakoby and Tantau which proves that given any graph of tree-width at most k, a O(log n) depth tree-decomposition of it witnessing width slightly more than k, say 4k, can be found in polytime (in fact in logspace). It is a nice result! I expect it to find some applications. It probably should be thought of as a depth reduction result. If the input graph is a tree of depth D, it is easy to find a depth D (which could be O(n)), width 1 tree-decomposition for it. What this Lemma says is that, we can find a depth O(log n) and width 8 de...