Bird Poop!!!

Mostly Humorous.

Many Ways of Getting Insulted!

Yesterday night I was thinking how much I used to hate most of the teachers in my school. Not all of them, some are quite good in fact, but some of them are very much hate-able. Then all of a sudden, my thoughts wandered off to the Indian Idol show, the fifth season of which concluded a few months ago. This sudden drift of thoughts resulted in intermixing of the elements from both the scenes, and I was stuck by the idea that how much funny it would actually be if the widely-hated teachers of my school end up as judges in this show. Would be quite entertaining for the audience.

Let's Dramatize! Here is the situation:- Its the finale of the Indian Idol. However, the three regular judges have mysteriously called in sick. Out of desperation, the organizers picked up the three teachers from our school to act as judges in this finale. (I know it's a bit too much, but let's suppose they did so). Now here are the person whom they chose- 1.) Mr. S S (Chemistry teacher)      2.) Mr S N T (Physics teacher)     3.) Mr D R S (Organic Chemistry teacher and the widely hated Principal).
Now the first finalist has finished singing his song, it's time for judges to comment. Well I am already feeling pity for the finalists.
SS: "It was not that bad. But you need to increase your energy and speed. You finished that song in 2 minutes and 23 seconds, while an IIT-ian can sing the same song in exactly 1 minute 59 seconds. Your song was quite pyara (lovely) by the way. You only need to increase your energy and speed. I don't want to say this, but if you happen to sing this song in a concert in one of the IITs, they will "kick you out".
DRS: "When you sing in public, how do people react to it? Do they pay you to stop singing or do they offer you Methyl Alcohol to drink? You are totally forgettable, I wonder how you came up to the finals. I expect that you must be going to some private singing classes to increase your singing quality. No wonder, you go from home to school, school to singing classes, from there back to home, now you are too tired, so you go to sleep. By the time you wake up next morning, you have already forgotten what you learnt the previous day. Your parents must be saying to everyone that our son is so hard-working, but I assure you, You Are Simply Wasting Your Parents' Money. I would rather give this Indian Idol award to J K J then to give it to you."
SNT: "Whenever you sing, there is a change of Bhiscosity in the air around your mouth. This causes a change of the air's Bhiscous Drag. This amount of Bhiscous Drag is directly proportional to the quality of your song. So now I am going to calculate the Bhiscous Drag of your song. (A long process of calculation which involves many weird looking one-liner diagrams and copious amount of integration and subsequent differentiations.) So you can see, your song's Bhiscous Drag is bhery-bhery less. This means that your song is bhery-bhery poor."
SS: "You simply need to increase the energy and power. If you will do this your song's viscosity will automatically increase, and so will be the quality of your song. This fact is verified by the VSEPR theory of singing, and is also in accordance with Mucliber's Principle of lone pair lungs, which is made possible by imperfect shielding of your windpipe by your tongue. Putting it simply, you simply need more energy and power, energy and power, ENERGY AND POWER.........
DRS: "There is also a chemical method of increasing your song's quality. Take 55ml of Ethyl Glycol and heat it with Benzene Pthaladimide at a constant temperature of 353 kelvin for exactly 12 minutes 35 and one-fourth seconds. Then add Carpolactum to this mixture, and then exactly at the pressure of 12 atm, add 5-Ethyl-3,3-DiMethyl-5-Amino-Pent-2,2-diol. Heat this mixture at 536 kelvin at a pressure of 12.2365atm for 3 weeks. Then pour this mixture in a tub, and stand naked in it overnight under a full moon. This process is known as Rowle-Dolohov Synthesis, guaranteed to provide an excellent singing quality. The side-effects include persistent loose motions, permanent lose of sanity etc."
SS: "Personally, I think that simply increasing Energy and Speed will do the trick......."
DRS: (shouting) "DO YOU THINK YOU KNOW MORE THAN ME????? I AM THE PRINCIPAL.........I SPEND MY WEEKENDS IN LONDON.........I KNOW THE FORMULA OF SODIUM NITRO-PRUSSIDE.....I AM CORRECT......"
SNT: "Yes, alright. Calm down. Now you kid here, look, in accordance to Lenz's Law.......hey, what's that?? There is water spilling from your water-bottle on this stage. HOW DARE YOU YO SPILL WATER ON THE STAGE. YOU ARE GOING TO HELL. NO DISCIPLINE AT ALL. YOU ARE SUSPENDED."
Voice from the back of stage: "It's time for a commercial!"
[commercial].  

Twinkle Twinkle Little Star!!!!

Everybody who is reading this must be quite familiar with the nursery rhyme "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star".
Yeah right, all of us were taught this one when we were a little more than toddlers. And unlike most of the junk which we usually learn in schools nowadays, learning rhymes was actually nice. As a bonus to me, when I used to recite some of these infront of my family after coming back from school, I always got the remarks like "awwwwwww...." or "cuuuuute"!

Most of us are quite familiar with its first prose. However very few are aware that this rhyme is way more longer than just four lines. I too, came to know of this fact yesterday when one of my friends pointed out this to me. She didn't remember the full lyrics herself, but I did some looking-up on internet and found it out (piece of cake, actually). Well, this poem was written was Jane Taylor , first published in Rhymes for the Nursery in London in 1806.



Here are its full lyrics:-
Twinkle, twinkle, little star,
How I wonder what you are!
Up above the world so high,
Like a diamond in the sky!

(Repeat:)
 *Twinkle, twinkle, little star,
How I wonder what you are!*

When the blazing sun is gone,
When the nothing shines upon,
Then you show your little light,
Twinkle, twinkle, all the night.
(*repeat)

Then the traveller in the dark,
Thanks you for your tiny spark,
He could not see which way to go,
If you did not twinkle so.
(*repeat)

In the dark blue sky you keep,
And often through my curtains peep,
For you never shut your eye,
Till the sun is in the sky.
(*repeat)

As your bright and tiny spark,
Lights the traveller in the dark,—
Though I know not what you are,
Twinkle, twinkle, little star.
(*repeat)
 Nice isn't it???

**For those interested in Nursery Rhymes, check out this site.

Watch Out at This Space!

Is anyone familiar with the fact that last week was the 50th anniversary of any human stepping out of this planet for a stroll???

Yup....correct, on April 12th, 1961 AD, Yuri Gagarin piloted himself out of this planet's in his ride, Vostok - I, and made history. That was the beginning of an entirely new era, and the subsequents outings of men to the moon was even cooler.

However, sitting here in 2011, I can't but be disappointed on how things have panned out after that. Fifty years after that of Mr. Gagarin's stroll, I would have expected space travel be as regular as that of Cox & Kings travel packages to Europe. But no. Not only do we own flying gravity-defying cars or have sexually attractive androids working in our kitchens, but "normal" people still can't travel to space. I wonder what people in 1970s-80s would have thought how 2011 would be like. If I were a teen in that time, then by now I would have been demanding my money back. So what really happened??? I rephrase Oscar Wilde - "We are all in the gutter, and no one can see the stars."

Seriously, what happened to that Soyuz vs Apollo, cosmonaut vs astronaut, Gagarin vs Armstrong war - how come all of those rivalry got replaced by Apple vs Microsoft thing?? I place some of my hope in the Chinese sending up the maned missions and building lunar colonies, India too is keeping its hands busy with the Chandrayaan. Not too bad to gear up the things, may be an Islamic Space Mission can do the trick (Come on, Iran!).

I'm of course, being quite optimistic. But for at least 25 years after 1961, the future looked tantalisingly good. With Gagarin's first space flight came the moment when science fiction merged with science fact in all its nerdy details and wide-eyed glory as a carefully selected farm boy-turned-fighter-pilot went outside the world and came back in single piece. No one has put it better than Nikita Krushchev's aide Fyodor Burlatsky: "I was in tears, and many people in the streets were crying with shock, a shock of happiness.... because a man was flying in heaven... the realm of God..."

Leaving the world has always been jettisoned in favour of saving the world. Even though sending cosmonauts and astronauts were, in part, a national muscle-flexing exercise, the primal thrill of leaving the Earth and entering a celestial zone was never out of sight. Here is how Gagarin described his first flight - "You can see the colourful change from the brightness of the earth to the darkness of the space as a thin dividing line, like a layer of film surrounding the Earth's atmosphere, and the transition is very gradual and lovely. When I emerged from the Earth's shadow, there was a bright orange strip along the horizon, which passed into blue, and then into a dense black."


Which is why I was so disappointed when I had first saw the old video of Rakesh Sharma, India's first cosmonaut, when he describes to Indira Gandhi, the then Prime Minister, that what he saw from insides of Soyuz-II in space: An India which was " sare jahan se achchha" (<--translation: "Best in the entire world"). From the "realm of God", that was one helluva banal observation.

Space is right above us and manned space travel beyond our orbit is something all we have seem to lose interest for a while. So instead of parroting that incredibly cheesy line apt for our cheese times 'Yes, we can!', I say, "Poyekhali!" -"Let's Go!" - as Gagarin has shouted out from inside of Vostok capsule perched on a R-7 rocket as it blasted out from Baikonur in Kazakhstan half a century ago. Going by the utter silence I'm getting as a response, I maybe in space already.

Maybe a too Hackneyed Hypothesis!

Did I mention in my introductory blog I like Astrophysics?????
Well, I like it quite a lot actually; usually I keep thinking crazy stuff over this topic. Most of these thoughts include the fantasies of Star-Cruisers, LightSabers, Jedis and similar stuff. But sometimes, more serious thoughts haunt my cerebrum. This is the time when I start making my own hypothesis, on how the universe came up in existence, how things got rolling to their present state, are there any Aliens out here waiting to say Hello etc. Yeah I know, I am not the only one with these stuffs overflowing from head.

But anyway, I had been thinking it would be a great idea to share my opinions. Only that I took the most risky way of sharing -I shared it in my College Application. I don't think the various College officials who read that were quite impressed my it, because they did not admit me (perfect time to use the services of this site). Well it was disappointing, but now I think it was not a very wise idea to put it up on my College Application, in form of an essay. I am putting that essay down here, see for yourself :-
I never get tired of looking up at the clear night sky. After all it's a pretty cool thing. It's where a tiny pinprick of light could be an entire galaxy in itself, teeming with billions of stars and a few more billions of planets. And then there are many more such pinpricks. No wonder, our universe is vast, it's absolutely fantastic! But then comes this big question –"How exactly did it turn up like this in the first place?
Something as big as this universe cannot come up unplanned. Imagining an unplanned universe is similar to assuming that a tornado raged through a junkyard and, purely by chance, by the time it left it had assembled an Airbus A-380 in there! But then what, does this mean there is some sort of grand architect somewhere up above, creating all the laws and everything. But if it's so then from where exactly this high level guy came around? There have to be someone above him, and then someone above that higher level guy, and so on. Mind-boggling, isn't it?
This ultimate question of the universe always teases me, bugs me, mocks me. Its answer is like a seductress, lying in the shadows, smiling to you, beckoning you towards her but vanishing into deeper depths when you take a step towards her. But we can't go further if we don't take steps. Personally, I find one hypothesis quite intriguing (of course, there are hundreds of them already, but this one is mine). What if our universe is not the only one out there, what if they are many more such universes, each following its own physical laws? This is not like picturing the parallel universes; anyway I don't agree with the concept of parallel universes. If there were any parallel universe then there must have been some sort of detectable interaction between our universe and any of the parallel ones, given the total amount of energy of a universe possess. Well till now, we haven't seen any, have we? It's more feasible to imagine the numerous universes like bubbles in an empty space. Those bubbles inside whom all the physical laws and the gravity works in consistency with each other survive and bloom, while the others blow up. Survival of the fittest, based on trial and error. Then there is no grand design, we are all just one of the numerous products, surviving because of some elegant accident!
Of course at first glance all this seems like one of those fantasy stories, but hey, space travel was a fantasy a hundred years ago. But yeah I agree, this is just a speculation for now. I don't know anything for sure of course, no one does. But I would love to try and find out!
I don't find the idea that our universe simply burst into existence with a (big) bang very much convincing. Our current theories say that it all started with that mega blast, and then everything kept on expanding, every piece falling in its place and in the end we got what we see today. But I feel that it's like saying you and I are here more or less due to a lucky stroke. What if even one thing in this whole process would have gone amiss? We wouldn't have been here then. No, this sounds rather absurd. Just consider this point – Our universe is balanced due to the presence of gravity (Stephen Hawking actually regards it as the hero of the universe). But if there would have been a little more gravity then the universe would have collapsed on itself like a heap, and if there would have been a little less then the universe will disintegrate! So how come there is exactly right amount of gravity around here, keeping everything in its place? All this is just too perfect, and as we know, there is nothing like perfection.
It would have been way better if I had some concrete proof to back up this theory of mine, general speculation is not too good :(. But I don't mind, next time I won't put up theories and hypothesis-es without having something to back it up in first place.

Attack!

**You know you are in trouble when <.........................................................(you forget what to write lol)...........................>

Hello Everyone out there!!!
This is Himanshu, though I really prefer to go by the name "Sunny". I was merely sitting out on my couch today watching NCIS while during an ad I started reading some of the old blogs of Snively when it dawned upon me that blogging could be a really cool idea to Let off Steam, Harangue against Rivals, Post pictures of cute Cats or Dogs etc....... So Bang, I am here!!! Blogging.........

A little bit of my overview, since this is my first blog and usually people introduce themselves in such a blog, so here I go. Though there is not much to tell, I will just tell my general likes and dislikes:-
  • General Likes - Astronomy, Gadgets, Cats, Dogs, Birds, People who care about nature, People who stop at yellow light, Going Green, Birthday Presents, Handwritten Cards, Pranking, Cartoons, Disney,  etc.*
  • General Dislikes - Chemistry, Rainwater in my shoes, Jarring Music at which everyone is madly shouting, Too Hot Weather, My Current School, Motor-Bikes etc.*
Over time I will be putting up some stuff here which could be about me, about the random guy in the bus, a new gadget which I like, etc.* That's why its says "Random Stuff" up there.

Anyway, thats all for the introductory post. Keep tuned in, fellas!


*etc --> End of Thinking Capacity.