nu-cu-lear Ghandi

A few days back, Amit Verma wondered why Westerners spelled Gandhi as Ghandi. I think it is just a case of a wrong-becoming-a-right simply because it was repeated often enuf... error being cast as a variation (or metathesis) of the norm - the kind of broohaha that one sees in the case of Bush (and many others like him) pronouncing nuclear as nu-cu-lear...or whatever it is Bush says and his supporters justify!! (And don't get me even started on other Bushisms and verbal gaffes)

anyways, just read Scott Adams (yes..him, of Dilbert fame) justifying the spelling because of a silent H .. much hilariy ensues :)

A silent h can be put anywhere you want, precisely because it is silent. So for example, it is equally proper to spell it Gandih, Gahndi, hGandi and even Gandhhhhhhhi.

and more fun later..

In Viking days, not only was the h totally noisy, but the Norsemen used them in practically every word. This caused a lot of confusion. The most common phrase in Viking became "Whhaht? I cahn't hunhderstand! Get the h out!" But it all came to a head one day when Eric the Artistic carved a wooden chair out of a tree stump and was showing it off to friends. That's when Allen the Insensitive said, "Nice Chairh, hEric. I thinkh I'll shit on it" Well, the next thing you know, swords are drawn and limbs are flying. And that was the day that the Vikings decided to stop talking in English and go discover the United States, which they called America.

haha.. Waiting for the day when "misunderestimated" and "subliminable" becomes a legit word :)

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via Monkeyfilter:

Do you speak American? PBS put together a site to go along with its broadcast special (premiered in January) that's chock full of linguistic goodness! Take a quiz or check out the dictionary.

Everything you wanted to know about our crazy language - from Slayer Slang to New York Speak to Women Talking Too Much to Artificial Voices in Technology. There's also a nice list of commonly mispronounced words. Some people will just never learn.

Death be not proud - 2

Pakistani cricketer, Wasim Raja dies from a heart attack while playing cricket
Obituary - The good die young Dileep Premachandran - Cross-border hero Gideon Haigh - A breathtaking strokeplayer

Veteran filmmaker Hrishikesh Mukherjee, feted with the Dadasaheb Phalke award and Padma Vibhushan, and director of several Hindi movies that continue to be enjoyed by me time and again, including Anand, Golmaal, Chupke Chupke, and other classics like Abhimaan and Khubsoorat, died at age 84 at the Leelavati hospital in Mumbai after a fight with a series of illnesses recently. His last work was Jhooth Bole Kauwa Kaate starring Anil Kapoor and Juhi Chawla, released in 1998....which I have not seen. Other fans pay tribute here..

Pati patni aur woh

Some spouses perhaps empathize more than others on this one :)

Laptop slides into bed in love triangle

As electronic devices get smaller, people tote their technology around the house more than ever. And as the number of home wireless networks also grows, laptops — along with Treos, BlackBerries and other messaging devices — are migrating into the bedroom and onto the bed. The marital bed has survived his-and-her book lights and the sushi-laden bed tray. Can it also survive computers that tether their owners to the office or make the bed the workplace itself? In the morning Larry Smith edits his online magazine in bed while his wife, Piper Kerman, tries not to lose sleep over it.

This part was hilarious..

She also lies in bed and exchanges instant messages with her husband, who is elsewhere in the house on his own computer.

Killer Lakes

Apparently, Geysers spewing sand and dust hundreds of feet into the "air" have been discovered on Mars. Images from a camera orbiting Mars on the Mars Odyssey probe have shown the 100mph jets of carbon dioxide erupt through ice at the planet's south pole.The geyser debris leaves dark spots, fan-like markings and spider-shaped features on the ice cap. The scientists said geysers erupted when sunlight warming the ice turned frozen carbon dioxide underground into high-pressure gas.

(In a bizzare coincidence, I saw a documentary on Science Channel yesterday on the 'killer lakes' of Africa - where a huge cloud of CO2 emanated from the bottom of the lake and killed 1800+ people around Lake Nyos in Cameroon in 1986. Had never heard of this huge tragedy before and moreso also that such a thing was possible on earth! Interesting how scientists went about deciphering what happened and also how to degass the lakes to prevent future disasters - although per this 2005 article, efforts to prevent the release of deadly clouds of toxic gas from two African lakes appear to be failing.)

Death be not proud - 1

Perusing through a list of people who died in 2006 on wikipedia (no..no morbid fascination about death - just happened to reach that page after reading the wiki entry on Bismillah Khan)..and read about 3 deaths in the last 4 days of July ...

1. Akbar Mohammadi - 34, Iranian student dissident, heart attack following a hunger strike and torture.
2. Sunil Kumar, 34, Bhopal disaster campaigner against Union Carbide and founder of Children Against Carbide, found hanged.
3. Jessie Gilbert, 19, British chess player, youngest Women's World Amateur Championship winner, fall.

I had not read about their deaths nor even ever heard of these 3 people ever until today and still rue their loss today - perhaps more than I mourn the loss of a maestro like Bismillah Khan.

Update: Confused writes about how life can be a bitch!

David Grossman is one of Israel’s foremost novelists and peace activists.He is perhaps best known for his 1987 novel Yellow Wind. Though, he was initially supportive of the Israel-Lebanon war, recently he came out strongly against the 11th minute expansion of the ground war. Israel has pushed thousands of troops in the last days of war to score some brownie points against the Hezbollah before the ceasefire set in. One of them was Grossman’s 20 year old son Staff Sgt. Uri Grossman. Grossman’s opposition to expansion of the war was prescient. Today, on the last day of war, his son was killed in Lebanon.

Note: "Death be not proud" is a reference to the famous poet, John Donne's poem by the same name.

DEATH be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadfull, for, thou art not so,
For, those, whom thou think'st, thou dost overthrow,
Die not, poore death, nor yet canst thou kill me.

More quotes from his work here.

Two thoughts

two blogposts by Amit Varma today lead me to two very interesting articles.

1. Adam Gopnik writes in the New Yorker (via India Uncut)

As “Camus at Combat,” a new collection of his editorials—he was a working journalist—makes plain, the experience, first, of the Nazi occupation of France, and then of the struggle of Algerian independence against France led him to conclude that the “primitive” impulse to kill and torture shared a taproot with the habit of abstraction, of thinking of other people as a class of entities. Camus was no pacifist, but he deplored the logic of thinking in categories. “We have witnessed lying, humiliation, killing, deportation and torture, and in each instance it was impossible to persuade the people who were doing these things not to do them, because they were sure of themselves and because there is no way of persuading an abstraction, or, to put it another way, the representative of an ideology,” he wrote. Terror makes fear, and fear stops thinking.

2) In an essay on John Updike's Terrorist, and on terrorism in general, Theodore Dalrymple
writes:

It is not the personal that is political, but the political that is personal. People with unusually thin skins ascribe the small insults, humiliations, and setbacks consequent upon human existence to vast and malign political forces; and, projecting their own suffering onto the whole of mankind, conceive of schemes, usually involving violence, to remedy the situation that has so wounded them.

Updike’s Terrorist has much in common with Conrad’s The Secret Agent, published 99 years previously. In both books, a double agent tries to get a third party to commit a bomb outrage; in both books, the secret agent ends up slain. In both books, the terrorists operate in a free society unsure how far it may go in restricting freedom to protect itself from those who wish to destroy it. The terrorists in Conrad are European anarchists and socialists; in Updike they are Muslims in America: but in neither case does the righting of any “objective” injustice motivate them. They act from a mixture of personal angst and resentment, which easily attaches itself to abstract grievances about the whole of society, thus disguising the real source of their consuming but sublimated rage.

Read more at Amit's original post

Fields Medal

Grigori Perelman, the Russian who in 2002 solved the Poincare Conjecture, one of the hardest problems in mathematics, has declined the top prize in Mathematics, the Fields Medal.

The Fields medal (Mathworld link) is awarded every four years on the occasion of the International Congress of Mathematicians to recognize outstanding mathematical achievement for existing work and for the promise of future achievement. The Field Medals, often said to be the Nobel Prize of Mathematics, were first proposed at the 1924 International Congress of Mathematicians in Toronto, where a resolution was adopted stating that at each subsequent conference, two gold medals should be awarded to recognize outstanding mathematical achievement. Professor John Charles Fields , a Canadian mathematician who was secretary of the 1924 Congress, later donated funds establishing the medals which were named in his honor, with the International Congress of Mathematicians adopting the proposal at the 1932 Zurich Congress and the first Fields Medals were awarded at the 1936 Congress in Oslo to Lars Valerian Ahlfors (Harvard University - for research on covering surfaces related to Riemann surfaces of inverse functions of entire and meromorphic functions. Opened up a new ideas in analysis) and Jesse Douglas (Massachusetts Institute of Technology - for work of the Plateau problem which is concerned with finding minimal surfaces connecting and determined by some fixed boundary. ) Note: List of Fields Medallists since then.

The Fields Medal is made of gold, and shows the head of Archimedes together with a quotation attributed to him: "Transire suum pectus mundoque potiri" ("Rise above oneself and grasp the world"). The reverse side bears the inscription: "Congregati ex toto orbe mathematici ob scripta insignia tribuere" ("the mathematicians assembled here from all over the world pay tribute for outstanding work"). - adapted from the Mathworld link mentioned above.

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Other References (via Wolfram Research)

Albers, D. J.; Alexanderson, G. L.; and Reid, C. International Mathematical Congresses, An Illustrated History 1893-1986, rev. ed., incl. 1986. New York: Springer Verlag, 1987.

Fields Institute. "The Fields Medal." http://www.fields.utoronto.ca/aboutus/jcfields/fields_medal.html.

International Mathematical Union. "Fields Medals and Rolf Nevanlinna Prize." http://elib.zib.de/IMU/medals/.

Joyce, D. "History of Mathematics: Fields Medals." http://aleph0.clarku.edu/~djoyce/mathhist/fieldsmedal.html.

Lopez-Ortiz, A. "Fields Medal: Historical Introduction." http://www.cs.unb.ca/~alopez-o/math-faq/mathtext/node19.html.

Lopez-Ortiz, A. "Why Is There No Nobel in Mathematics?"

MacTutor History of Mathematics Archives - The Fields Medal.

Monastyrsky, M. Modern Mathematics in the Light of the Fields Medals. Wellesley, MA: A. K. Peters, 1997.

Technische Universität Berlin. "The Four Fields Medallists and the Nevanlinna Prize Winner of The International Congress of Mathematicians, Berlin 1998." http://www.tu-berlin.de/presse/pi/1998/pi182e.htm.

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Other Links to Perleman (from the wiki entry)

• Perelman's eprints on the arXiv
• Grigori Perelman at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
• Staff listing for Perelman at Petersburg Department of Steklov Institute of Mathematics
• Mathematics & Mechanics Faculty of St. Petersburg State University
• Petersburg Department of Steklov Institute of Mathematics
• Notes and commentary on Perelman's Ricci flow papers
• International Mathematical Olympiad 1982 (Budapest, Hungary) Individual Scores
• Maths genius living in poverty