Celebrity chat anyone?

This is one chat transcript I must check back to see.

Rediff has organized a chat with none other than (gasp!) Yuvraj Singh's Mom. I know we're a cricket-mad nation but really now ... who on Earth would log in to chat with Shabnam Singh? What kind of questions would be asked? The mind boggles ...

Geeky delight

Undo Software unveiled its bidirectional debugger a couple of days ago.

The Undo DB debugger allows you to run a program backwards in time as well as forwards. It adds special commands to gdb, which let you step back line by line of code or just rewind all the way back to a particular point of execution. So now, not only do you control the flow of execution (like a traditional debugger) but you also can control the direction of the flow (backwards or forwards).

The other cool thing (besides the fact that its based off of gdb) is that Undo DB is being released first to the Linux market.

Life imitating Art

A real life Fight Club - and that too in the heart of Silicon Valley?

Yes, its true! Inspired by the 1999 movie starring Edward Norton and Brad Pitt, Silicon Valley techies meet up every couple of weeks and proceed to beat each other up. The reasons given range from - "its a vent to act out my violent tendencies" to - "I want to get hit, I want to feel something real" to a simple - "its to overcome my fear of fighting".

I guess sometimes video games just aren't enough.

Ground Zero

I came across this word for the first time in early/late seventies when I had to study Nuclear Warfare either for studying for my promotion examination or subsequently preparing for my Defense Services Staff College Entrance Examination. The term ‘Ground Zero’ was defined as a point on the surface (ground or at sea) at which a surface burst or a point on the surface above or below which, a sub-surface or a low / high airburst of a nuclear device occurs. This concept of Ground Zero is important in Nuclear Warfare since its distance from the point of burst of a nuclear weapon along with the type of burst, determine the pattern of distribution of its total destructive power into various components ( flash, blast, thermal and nuclear radiation).

I remember that I was quite impressed by this word also because it seemed to combine all three dimensions of the Space but with a little difference (combining Length and Breadth into a single dimension, adding sub-surface Depth or Negative Height as the second dimension with Height above the surface providing the third dimension). I had not come across any other word, which had better illustrated any other concept of Old or Newtonian Physics. Later, when I read or rather tried reading Einstein and somewhat understood how he had introduced the fourth dimension of Time to Newtonian model and unlike Newton, who believed that Time and Space were different, even combined these two and called it as a Time-Space Continuum, that I realized that it was this concept of Ground Zero that had considerably aided my comprehension of the Continuum. Later but much later I felt that I had come around to get a faint understanding of the difficult concept of a singularity of a Black Hole where all laws of Physics are believed to break down completely, and where even Space and Time disappear. So for me, it all had started with Ground Zero.

After 9/11, I noticed that the Fourth Estate has been frequently using this term to denote the point on the ground, above which then stood the mighty twin towers of the World Trade Center, before they were humbled down by the terrorists' hara-kiri style air-strike. Please note that this word has been used here only in a single dimension.

India has been recently simmering with protest against the Government policy of having a caste-based quota- reservation system for higher professional education. The medical fraternity in the country in general, and the doctors of the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) in our country’s capital in particular, have been in the forefront of this protest campaign. Today, I found the Press making a more imaginative use of this word by describing AIIMS as the Ground Zero of this nation-wide protest. Perhaps, the use of the word ‘Epicenter’ may have sufficed but the Press would like us to believe that this discontent had been lying dormant for all these days and has surfaced only now. This time the word has been used probably in two dimensions but is yet short of its three-dimension use by the Armed Forces. We all know that the concept of Management also originated with the Armed Forces.

And I recently came across that ‘military intelligence’ is an example of an Oxymoron. Oh my God!

Musing over Cricket

Batting, those days, had only one dimension: technique. Greatness of the batsmen (sorry, but the word ‘batter’ like the other gender-free word ‘actor’ belongs to later era and I am so glad for that) was assessed only by the soundness of their technique. A good batsman played all his strokes exactly as given in the copybook. Straight (vertical) bat was the norm and a cross (horizontal) bat was frowned upon or rather looked down upon by the purists of the game.

Improvisation, which is considered a virtue by all lovers of the present shorter version of the game, was unheard of. Some may argue that improvisation requires greater talent or a class whereas technique, at its best is only a craft. While the latter (technique) is like the grammar of a language, improvisation is more like a poem which does not always follow its rules. They can site the example of Don Bradman as someone who represents the former class (pun unintended) and point their finger probably at Jeff Boycott as a typical technically correct but an unexciting batsman to watch.

The advent of One Day cricket seems to have started the dialectic between these two, which in turn appeared to associate themselves with the longer and the shorter versions of the game respectively. The great Test players like Gavaskar lived in the era when this dialectic was at its first two stages of Theses and Antitheses and therefore could not quite make an easy transition from Test cricket to Onedayers. But now the dialectic has entered its final stage –that of Synthesis and consequently, one now finds Pontings, Tendulkars, and Inzamans who can excel themselves in both forms of the game. A modern cricketer needs to have a mix of these two cricketing abilities albeit in varying proportions; this mix needs to be technique-rich for the Test cricket and vice versa.

Television has really done a yeoman service to Cricket and this game can never, ever pay back its debt to the former. Firstly, it has taken the game to people’s living rooms located miles away from where it is played. Secondly, it has made this game more transparent than it was in the past and of course I am referring to the hindsight that is now possible, thanks to the technology, for almost all umpiring decisions. Thirdly, it has linked the game to the advertising world and consequently has produced millionaire players and super-rich Controlling Organizations of the game in some countries. Board of Control of Cricket in India, which was probably counting its pennies some years ago, has metamorphosed into a veritable empire with tremendous financial clout and now more resemble the ultra-rich Boards of Trustees for pilgrim-centers like Tirupathi and Shirdi than its poor cousins controlling other games.

Adding an extra dimension

The pictures here are simply amazing.

Viewed from the proper angle, they look completely 3 dimensional and astonishingly real (especially look at the last one).

Perspective is a hard thing to get right (and not just in Art). While travelling around Europe, I was struck by how long it took Italian artists to come to terms with using perspective while painting. A lot of the artists were sculptors who also dabbled in the painting arts so it makes sense that it would be a struggle to go from can-get-your-hands-around-it to a flat piece of canvas.

Aren't you glad you're human?

Just in time for Mother's Day, the New York Times has an article describing unmaternal behavior in different animal species.

• Pandas give birth to twins frequently. Apparently they treat one as a 'spare' and when the favored offspring seems to be sure to survive, the spare is left to fend for itself (and often perishes as a result).
  
• Egret, pelican and crane parents completely ignore bigger and stronger siblings repeatedly attacking the weaker ones. In the absence of parental intervention, the weaker bird babies rarely survive for long.
  
• A mother nurse shark may incubate as many as 20 eggs at a time. As the eggs hatch, the sharklets start feeding on each other. At the end of the gestatory period, only one sharklet survives.
  
• Magellanic penguins will lay two eggs and hatch them both. Then the Magellan mommy will feed most of the food she gets to the larger chick eventually starving out the smaller one.

Gives a whole new meaning to survival of the fittest, doesn't it?