talks

You must have heard of those talks that go on here every day (and sometimes more than one in a day). Well there was this talk by John Hopcroft (of Hopcroft-Ullman fame) the other day that people say was very nice. I don't know for sure because I was fast asleep in my room when it took place.
As if to make amends for my sleepiness I went to this French guy's talk in the evening (sorry I can not recall his name at all). He talked on Lambda Calculus (of which I knew nothing beyond the spelling), had a heavy French accent (I could not decipher half the words he spoke) and cracked a joke once in an hour (I couldn't laugh as I was too dumb to get them). And after two and a half hours of endless drawling he finally said that it was over. I had just sat through the worst talk in my life. I fell half asleep and hurriedly ran to the coffee-shop as I had a report to complete. The talk had started with around forty people in the room, but, as people could stand it no longer and trickled out, there were only five left in the end.
But there are these nice talks too. There was one on P vs NP. A professor sitting through the talk was trying very hard to stay awake but was invariably dozing off on his neighbour's shoulder. On another such occasion, a professor was nodding off and as his shoulder strained he jerked to consciousness. This happened every 5 seconds. And every time he awoke with a jerk he put on an expression that he was the most attentive listener this side of the table.
But the best show was put up by a senior professor who came in late, took a chair, closed his eyes, leaned backwards and went off to sleep. He kept nodding in his sleep, as if to agree with the speaker. He was brought to reality by his phone ringing. He went out answering the phone and never returned.

Journeys

I like journeying by train. The liking is mostly due to my passion for the railways which I have nurtured since my childhood.

Among several reasons that I do not like air journeys within the country is that they are very short. Another is that the passengers are very unsocial. They tend to keep their nose high and lips pursed.

I reached Delhi by the Calcutta Rajdhani Express. Although there is always more entertainment in travelling by a sleeper class coach of a less hyped train, a Rajdhani does not always lie far behind. Take for instance the family travelling with a one and a half year old child who kept roaming the compartment on her own tugging at people's books, newspapers and laptops, all the while smiling. Then there arrived another child who always looked angry and the two children immediately took to rivalry. A lot of crying and shrieking followed of course.

Then there was a Bengali family who boarded the compartment at Dhanbad and woke up an old lady sleeping on the lower berth because she could not climb to the upper berth and immediately picked up a fight (typical of Bengalis) with the others on where to put the luggages.

But the peak of the event came at dawn. At Kanpur Junction a girl boarded the compartment and woke up the nice lady sleeping on the berth below me claiming that the berth was hers. I immediately knew where the confusion lay but chose to wait and watch. After a lot of debate and cross examination of tickets I raised my voice and asked which train did she want to board. She promptly and confidently replied, "Sealdah Rajdhani". I smugly replied that this was the Calcutta Rajdhani. The Sealdah Rajdhani would follow in 10 minutes. She hysterically cried, "O shit! o shit". But, shit or not, the train had started moving. It was left to the merciful Deputy Train Superintendent to find her an empty berth and let her travel 'ticket-less' for the rest of the journey to New Delhi.

I am home...

Ah! Finally I find time for another post. I have been back in Howrah a week after what I must describe as the toughest 4 months of my life. 4 months during which my routine was ...sleep-eat-class-assignments-eat-assignments-eat-assignments-sleep... And what would I not give for a peaceful night of sleep then. I had nightmares all night of I not finishing an assignment, of an instructor failing me, and then there would be a segmentation fault and I would wake up with a jerk.

I have been making up and sleeping a lot this last week. But work has already piled up and I must go back to it soon.

Until next time, good bye.

Obamaniac

The CWG scams disappeared from the front pages of the newspapers, so did the Adarsh scam. Why? Because Barrack Obama had come to India. The minutest details of his daily activities had to be featured in the front page of every newspaper... and there can be only one front page for a newspaper (if you do not consider the latest gimmick of selling out the front page for full page ads). God!!!

Even the death of Sidhdhartha Shankar Ray could only find the bottom most column of the Kolkata edition of The Times of India.

Kudos to The Indian Express

I have been skeptical about the materials that appear in the print and visual media since long. Regular followers of yours sincerely will have noticed that. The point that I always tried to drill home is the media criticises all, but who criticises the media? Well, the unfortunate answer is that the general Indian public is so overwhelmed with the gimmicks that the media come up with that they will believe anything presented to them, and there is none to find faults with them. Taking advantage of this, the media now manufacture breaking news to increase their TRP.

I was very happy that The Indian Express reported on the drama being manufactured by news channels on the Delhi Floods. Please read it, it's kind of hilarious.

Udaan

They were running a free show of Udaan at the Dogra Hall yesterday. I took it as a welcome break from the strangling schedule here.

The theme was very contemporary: boy wants to do something while the father wants him to do something else. Add to it that the father is a psycho who keeps beating his children and marrying every time his wife dies.

The director does an excellent work mostly, except at the end. The ending could be better. If the solution is to run away from home, he could have done it a lot earlier: why wait so long?

The music was good and the background songs were well placed. The acting skills of all the actors deserve special mention.

It was a good experience which refreshed my mind.

P ≠ NP

While we carry on with our daily chores, one of the biggest breakthroughs in the realm of theoretical computer science may have just been made.

Vinay Deolalikar of HP Research Labs, Palo Alto has just released a paper to his fellow researchers claiming to have proved that P ≠ NP. This was something that has been baffling the greatest computer scientists of the day. Everyone sort of knew that the result was this, but, somehow, the proof had been eluding them. Such was the craze that there's a $1M prize money for the proof. Now the paper will be scanned from jacket to jacket under the eyes of uber-math geeks. (To get the feel of the uber-math geek thing, see this.) And if the approach turns out to be genuine, quite a few text books will have to be written.

The most important thing is that the gentleman at the centre of all this is an Indian.