The LHC, The End Of The World And The Fountain

The Large Hadron Collider [LHC] officially came online on Wednesday. Doomsayers and the rest of mankind alike heaved a sigh of relief. There were no black holes created, even less any strangelets. Maybe they rejoiced without reading the fine print. Maybe the end-of-the-world-is-nigh folks need to strap on their boots once again because the funny rhyming rapper/scientists never really initiated any collision. Yeah that's right, the CERN scientists and engineers "rapped" about the LHC. And it's pretty impressive. Watch the video below shot at the LHC itself with CERN scientists and engineers all grooving around in it.

So there is CERN playing around with some protons on wednesday in some test runs. Even xkcd joked about it. The collisions are scheduled to happen within the month, no specific date. So should we be worried? Not according to the overwhelming majority of scientists. The probability of micro black holes devouring the earth is even lesser than that of Bush solving a quadratic equation. You see micro black holes will likely form but a form of radiation called "Hawking radiation" [after Stephen Hawking] will seep out of them and they will fade away in microseconds.

On the other hand Professor Otto Rossler from the University of Tubingen,Germany is all crazy over the LHC. This is one of the sweet things he has to say about the LHC - “Nothing will happen for at least four years. Then the weather will change completely, wiping out life. There will be a Biblical Armageddon.”[1]. Yeah ... that kind of "crazy". He's sued CERN in the European Court of Human Rights and ranted on and on about the "end of humanity" to the hungry world media. But inevitably his voice soon began to be ignored. Feeling sympathetic and wanting to know about this "mad" professor, I checked out the Wikipedia entry on him. And let me tell you, this guy is no dufus. He is close to being a polymath in scientific circles, authoring scientific papers on biogenesis, differentiable automata, artificial universes and the origins of language !! He bases his LHC claims on some obscure commentary by a scientist on the General theory of relativity some hundred years back. Ok, maybe he's a bit paranoid but we will just sit around and watch if his predictions come true. Rest assured, there won't be anyone (or anything) around to congratulate him if he turns out right :).

The end of the world aside, yesterday I happened to watch a movie called "The Fountain" by Darren Aronofsky. And boy did it take my breath away. It was pure poetry in motion. And I couldn't make any sense of it. But I felt that wasn't it. I was missing something. There was some hidden meaning behind it all. The story was spread across three ages with the lead actor Hugh Jackman as a conquistador, a scientist and as a astronaut/Bodhisattva and the story kept going back and forth the time lines. And the common theme that bonds it all is the Mayan "tree of life" and the protagonist's love/devotion for Izzy/Queen Isabella played by Rachel Weisz. It's about a man's quest to find the elixir of life, a cure for mortality. Later I went and downloaded the movie [I do piracy for educational purposes only ;)]. Finally I could claim to make some sense out of it. And one thing I learned was that this movie has to be appreciated by one's own terms. I would recommend watching it alone. Frankly, it's an awesome spiritual experience. I remember a critic saying so "This movie is too advanced for our times, our tastes have not evolved enough to truly appreciate the movie". One thing I can definitely say about the movie is that the protagonist finally understands the futility of it all and finally accepts death as the true path to immortality.

The Mayan Tree Of Life in The Fountain

Talking about LHC and the Mayan tree of life, it is interesting to note that the Mayan calendar ends on December 21st, 2012. The "long" version of their calendar which started around 5000 years back stops abruptly at 2012. They don't exactly say what happens then. Maybe Professor Otto is onto something.

XKCD : Intro

XKCD : A web comic of romance, sarcasm, math and language
Created by Randall Munroe, this web comic is available at http://xkcd.com. The author after finishing a long stint at NASA, started drawing stick figure comics with themes ranging from broken hearts to establishing links between Firefox and witchcraft ;). A true internet phenomenon. Randall releases his cartoons under the creative commons attribution license. So I will be reproducing my favorites here periodically. If you don't get the joke, don't worry. Maybe the joke is on you after all :)

Pong

Smiley Navras

Premise
A week before. It is Onam time in the campus. There is going to be an interdepartmental Onam Pookalam [flower arrangement] competition. The Computer Applications department had always ended up in either of the top two positions since the competitions began a few years back. And this time it's my batch [the 2nd years : halfway between naive and sensible :) ] that has to manage the pookalam for the CA dept. No sweat.

The geek saves the day
We plan on a conventional geometric design. and mind you people tend to be really conservative when it comes to pookalam designs. The girls decide on some design. But yours truly was unconcerned with all of that since he was busy reading "Watchmen" by Alan Moore. It is a pretty ordinary novel if you discount its postmodern themes, the characters who are all superheroes and the fact that it is the only graphic novel to be included in the Time magazine "the 100 best English-language novels" and the only one to win the Hugo award ... phew. Anyways the oft-repeating blood splattered smiley in the novel stuck in my mind as did the smiley that appears on the mars surface. The mars smiley I later discover really does exist.

So there I was talking to my friend Sanju about the large hadron collider at 3 in the morning. I told him about the teeny-weeny possibility of black holes and "strangelets" being formed by the LHC transforming our planet into bluish goo, and he started laughing, thinking that I was joking [let's see who is laughing in a few days when the LHC starts, ha!]. That very instant, instead of feeling outraged by his lack of consideration for the one in a billion chance of a black hole forming on the earth, I had this strange vision of smileys showing the navarasas. [Yeah ... ok ... It is not exactly how it all happened but just bear with me]. I told sanju about it. The conversation went something like this :
Sanju : "Wow man!! That's a great idea!!"
Me : "Dude, I was just kidding!"
Sanju : "Hmmm ... ok"
Me : "You know that we don't have a chance against the other departments don't you? They have more money and manpower than us. And this time ours seniors will be busy with laying 3 pookalams in the ashram. So it's just us and the juniors."
Sanju : "Yup. We don't stand a chance with our existing design"
Me : "Yeah .... it's like we have nothing to lose ..."
Sanju : "Let's try something different then!"
Sanju,Me in chorus : "I know, a pookalam based on smileys!!"

Long story cut short, I managed to convince the girls the next day about the change in design [don't ask, hell is better]. The juniors were a more amiable bunch, most just didn't care. We didn't mention the idea to the seniors because they generally tend to "receptive" to new ideas [wink, wink].

The Navarasas


So what are the navarasas? Apart from the impressive but incorrectly named Matrix Revolutions soundtrack "Navras" by Juno Reactor, most people [westerners and Indians alike ] are not aware of the significance of the navarasas in Indian culture in the fields of dance, theater and art. All the possible emotional states that can be expressed by a human being are categorized into the following 9 [also described by the bharatanatyam poses in the picture shown above] :

• Love - Sringaram
• Comic - Hasyam
• Pathetic - Karunam
• Furious - Raudram
• Heroic - Viram
• Terrible - Bhayanakam
• Odious - Bibhatsam
• Surprise - Adbutam
• Tranquility - Shantam

[courtesy : Wikipedia]

The Pookalam
Concocting crazy ideas is easy but after that comes the hard stuff : the designing. We spent hours getting the expressions right with the smileys. It had to be simple and to the point. We consulted Yahoo! & AIM emoticons and navarasas as expressed by bharathanatyam, kathak and kathakali. Getting hasyam, raudram, adbutam, shantam and karuna on smileys was easy. I designed the sringaram smiley with heart shaped eyes. But bibhatsam and bhayanakam proved to be hard to design. Many redesigns later we decided on Varun's [another friend] design for bibhatsam and mine and sanju's design for bhayanakam. The background design provided by Sanju was already a winner at a contest at his previous college [his team won 1st]. It would signify the lack of any apparent design in the flow of emotions that we all go through. But on careful scrutiny one could see that the background had the shape of an Omkar.The contest here emphasized on having a theme for the pookalam. And we had plenty to offer : The confluence of the ancient and modern, a tribute to the sms and IM age where emotions are expressed by short ASCII art .... You get the drift.
Without much further ado I present to you the "Smiley Navras" [Insert rousing music here]

The Aftermath
Based on the reactions from all who saw our design, we were clearly the favorites. But then again, Al Gore too was the favorite for the US presidential election in 2000 ;).
The results were out in the evening : The CA department got 2nd with a traditional boat replica as the prize !! :) . The IT dept beat us to numero uno. It turns out that theirs was bigger than ours [The maximum diameter was 2m while ours was 1.5 m] and they had arranged some traditional Kerala stuff besides the pookalam [para, pudava etc] that somehow none of us remembered. But the IT dept's pookalam was clearly excellent. And ... I was a bit pissed off.
It was great to be in the 2nd place nonetheless [oh boo hoo :( ]. We were the underdogs and our innovative idea clearly won over the other more expensive ones from the other departments.

The virtuous circle continues : today morning my brother went and laid the exact same design at his school [Kendriya Vidyalaya, TVM]. His team won the first with 97 points out of a possible 100 with the 2nd team trailing way behind at 85!! :)

Oh yeah and it turns out that Al Gore got an even better deal : An Oscar, a Nobel peace prize and a halo over his head. Things really have a way of working out I guess. :)

Blog Undefined

The blog. Prone to extreme and incoherent ideas and after years of bugging my friends incessantly with my senseless rantings, it's high time I take it to the next level : The Internet. I wanted to define myself in the digital world and what better way to do that that than in a blog? Copies of my digital thoughts stored on countless Google server farms all around the world. Great. Who wants immortality then?
The title. It's a reference to Philip K Dicks classic sci-fi novel "Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?" which was adapted into arguably one of the best sci-fi movies ever - "Blade Runner". Yes me geek :)
Me. I study computer applications at Amrita University, Amritapuri campus. So it goes without saying that my blog will be filled with a lot of computer science stuff. But that won't be the only thing I will be talking about. My interests span almost all spheres of human activity. Hmm .... well ... cricket is an exception though, which must be a rarity among Indians :). Can't seem to have anything in mind right now. You know, it's a zen thing. Well it's a brief goodbye I guess, until I come out of my satori.