Prologue to upcioming Novel

The gentle zephyr sifted through the northern window of the citadel. The reclusive tower of the citadel rose eight fathoms and a half above the tallest roofs of the beautiful white city of Nossar. The city was built by the adept hands of men Linar. It was said that the mortar mixed by the men of Linar held magic. The formidable city had withstood the sands of time, it had seen thousands of winters, dozens of great wars, and The Fault, and this was the testament to the claim.
The guards in the citadel were drowsy; the keen wind was soporific, obliterating any possibility of an alert watch. They were the best of the archers in the city selected and trained by the masters of The Yard, they were keen of sight, could gaze into leagues of battlement, but they were no guards. They were summoned by the king and commanded to keep a watch for a brown eagle flying westwards. The convoluted command had not given place for much doubt, for the air was rife with the rumor that The Sybil had spoken. The command to watch for this omen was all but unexpected. The connection was uncanny.
The high Seer seldom spoke, but when he did everyone took notice, for the great orb never lied, and as skeptics were noticing, it spoke naught but of foreboding ill. The last The High Seer had spoken it was in a spring two hundred and forty four years ago. The whole kingdom was thrown into a torpor. The then king, King Enueal the third, had ordered every host to ready for the eventuality, every able bodied man of the kingdom was armed, every armoury was emptied. The war beasts were untethered, and readied for war. The husbandmen of country were asked to fortify their villages. Hosts were armies were readied all through the Empire, from the Northern high passes to southern sea, from the Forest in the east to Fiery mountains in the west where the dragons.
The Empire had all but given up to mass hysteria, only the king’s rule had kept the Empire from disintegrating. He had journeyed through the empire under sun and moon, against biting chill and scorching heat, and his captains had been the sinew of the effort.
But no preparation was to stand against the fate, and the doom did befall. The Seer’s words were chilling when they had come, but they were accurate to the last syllable. The Fault had occurred. But this time, the king had taken up the challenge more surreptitiously. No one knew the exact words The Sybil had spoken, but the terseness was no less than last time.
The Empire was waiting with bated breath. The very air seemed to be heavy in the Upper Hall; the assembled captains had come back to report in on the errands they were sent on, in the preparations. But far away from the stifling air of the expectant city, far away indeed from the heavy wi-fi traffic of the city sat a Sage, keen blue eyes, a fleck of frost on his brow, gray and wrinkled into a thousand lines of age. The robe he wore was white but somehow it looked refulgent against the gray of the bower he sat in. He had chosen this place, under the white cedar tree, for the tranquility it offered. There he sat his fingers lithe on the keyboard keying in the final commands. And when the packet began to flow in, a smile broke upon the thin lips. He knew exactly what the seer had said, “Every ISP shall fail, every server shall crash, every table Reset. No Ethernet shall stand. The Network shall fall”, and as the fate would have it, he now knew exactly how to avert this crisis.

PS: The inspiration for this write up comes from Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien, Computer Networks - Andrew Tannenbaum, and a boring ETM Lecture of a Friday Morning, and as you might have guessed by now, I am not writing any new Novel, the title was simply a last thought, to complete the craziness.

Infrequently Asked Questions

Hello reader,

Thanks for visiting, Thanks also to all those 24 visits, where all you saw was just a welcome note (there are x ways for 1 to 24 different users to have visited!) . Had exams and other commitments so couldn’t write. Now that I am here, lemme start talking.

I am going to take a leaf out of my Software Engineering text book, authored by Ian Sommerville, and start the blog with a set of FAQs (given my way I would take out every single leaf and leave that darned book in bits, for it is the reason I did my SE paper so pathetically, more on the book in coming posts), only that these questions are not frequently asked, nor are they answered here. I think hardly anyone has ever asked you these questions, ‘cause I’ve compiled these questions from my itsy bitsy brain since a long time. Here I go:

1. How do erasers work? Why are softer erasers better than harder ones?

2. We’re told that electrons are fast enough and light enough to be considered waves, so be it. Now imagine an atom moving at speed close to that of light. If the heavy nucleus is thought of as matter, and electrons as waves nucleus gets heavier due to its motion by theory of special relativity, while electrons do not. If this is the case, do the electrons spin around the nucleus any faster/slower to conserve momentum? Whilst increasing their de Broglie wavelength? (Remember, electron speed is determined by two opposing forces, the attracting electrostatic force, and the repelling centrifugal force)

3. Why do women wear lipstick, blush, nail polish etc? This needs a bit of elaboration: it’s a known fact that body pumps more blood to our erogenous parts, including lips, cheeks and finger tips when we’re sexually excited (check it next time personally ;-) ). So, do women wear these make-ups to fake a perpetual hard-on? (I know ‘hard-on’ is strictly a male term, but I don’t know the female counter part) That is, do they try to have us believe that they’re sexually excited by coloring their visible erogenous parts in red ( I know there are other colors, but it started with the color of blood, i have a feeling this is the reason it began)? Do women know all this when they’re putting on all these make up? If they do, why do they flinch if a guy stares at them of flirts with them which brings about the actual effects of reddened pout, cheeks, and nail? If they don’t, do they wear it as a tradition (if this is the case why do men actually find it arousing to see a woman with blush and lipstick? Better still, if they wear it only for tradition, does is not settle the age-old question of who is more stupid of the two sexes? )Finally, will I ever get a girlfriend?

4. BMTC issues daily passes for a fixed amount ( now it is Rs.30). Does anyone buy this pass if they know they’re about to spend less than 30 bucks on bus fares that day? And if everyone spends more than 30 on that day, how does BMTC make a profit by selling these passes? If they don’t, why do they vehemently sell them?

5. Imagine I am a heavy smoker and you know this fact well. Imagine also that you’re a smoker. Now if I come and tell you to stop smoking ‘cause it’s bad for your lungs, what will be your immediate reaction. I think it’ll be along the lines of “look who’s talking”. Now imagine that I am a person of unquestionable integrity, and that I am a very honest person (which I actually am ;-) ), and you know this. Now if I indirectly instigate you to cut a queue, skip a ticket on bus etc, what will be your immediate reaction? I am sure it’ll not be something like the one above. Either you think “what is in it for him that he’s instigating me” or “lemme try it, there’s won’t be much harm, will there?”, after which you may or may not cut the queue. In either case, you don’t immediately think about my integrity like you would think of my smoking habits.

Why are we like this? Why do we accept negative things so easily, rather why are we so rigid while moving away from bad habits, are we built like that?

6. Is time continuous? Or is it hopping in small quantums and eluding us for this long like light did? If it is continuous, there are two sub questions here:

6a. Imagine an event, e1 that occurs at time t1 at co-ordinates c1,c2,c3. Consider some interval Δt. Now consider an instant t1-Δt, can we notice the event e1 at this instant? Definitely not (we can’t see the events in the future). There’s no harm in considering “existence of a tortoise” as an event. Now consider a tortoise moving at velocity v. Time is delayed for the tortoise by a very, very small factor due to relativity (but there’s non-zero dilation). Meaning, if tortoise time is dilated by a small amount Δt for time t, then it spends t+Δt when the rest of the universe spends time t? By above analogy, the tortoise should just cease to exist in our time, or vice-versa, if it moves? But we don’t see moving object disappearing; can anyone read me this puzzle? (Time continuity comes into picture because the very small Δt is equated to zero in our text books as if something shorter than a particular interval is all zero, like in floating point numbers in computing to zero below some small value).

6b. Consider any inverse-square force, let’s say, gravitational force. Imagine a stone falling to earth. Imagine a very, very small instant of time Δt just before impact, let’s say a kutti-second (kutti is a word used by many people around here to indicate something very small) before impact. (let kutti = infinitely small factor). At this instant the stone is infinitely close to earth, so it must suffer infinitely large force, and consequently infinitely large acceleration, implying very, very large velocity in the next instant. So, we can set the values of Δt and thus r^2 in the equation such that acceleration is such that velocity is more than that of light for at least an instant (now the questions of dilation and questions 6a come into picture) ? Technically, we must be able to do it, as time is continuous and thus we can take Δt to be as small as we wish. Can you read me this puzzle?

7. In the movie ‘Taare Zameen Par’ ( a movie about a dyslexic kid and his teacher’s struggle to bring him up to mark with his peers – an excellent movie by Aamir Khan), there is a scene where the teacher is pleading with principal to ask teachers to take test orally for the kid (‘cause he cannot write), stating “knowledge is knowledge, we don’t have to make the kid write to prove it). So far, so good. Now imagine the kid loses his ability to speak during exam (just like he’s deprived of his ability to write correctly, at birth) does it then mean that he does not have knowledge? Of course not – just like his inability to write is not proof of absence of intelligence, nor is ability to speak. So it implies that proof of intelligence is not about putting it across so the others can assimilate it. Then what is the proof of existence of intelligence? Now go back to Turing test, where the computer is required to baffle the human user into believing that it is in fact a human and not a computer. Now if the computer cannot put across its knowledge just like Ishaan Avasthi (the dyslexic kid in the movie), can we dub the computer as un-intelligent? If not, then can I claim that the gadget in my desk drawer is super intelligent (or at least as intelligent as humans) but it cannot put its intelligence across thus fails Turing test ? in short is i/o proof of presence or absence of intelligence?

8. "White!” he sneered. "It serves as a beginning. White cloth may be dyed. The white page can be overwritten; and the white light can be broken." – from Lord of The Rings, Council of Elrond, pg 259 in my copy, Gandalf repeating Saruman’s reaction to the council.

Question: Did the people of Middle Earth know about Raleigh scattering and/or the prism effect? ;-)

9. What’s the value of x above?

10. When will she start talking to me again? When will it stop hurting? Will it ever?

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So, you’ve reached the end of this ‘small’ blog entry? Thank you. Please answer the questions if you have convincing answers. I hope you enjoyed reading them even if answers are not easy to come by. I’ve deliberately left out questions concerning Computing, they’ll definitely be fun to read and think over. I’ll dedicate one whole post for it sometimes later.

Cheers :-)

PS: Sorry for too many parentheses, it’s a bad habit I picked up from programming in LISP, I suppose.

Back Again

Hi Folks,
It had been long since I deleted my blog page, but the memories of what happened din't die. Nor did the itch. Thanks for dropping by, don't remind me of what happened last time, (and if possible , don't repeat it either).
This time, I've promised myself to not to post anything that may repeat what happened last time.
That does NOT mean will not take out my ire on issues, events and people. :-)
Now that I'm done with the disclaimer, lemme get cracking..
Bye.