Trave(b)logue

Been traveling again. Three hotels in two weeks. And all in the same city. Sounds crazy. Feels crazier still in reality. I can't imagine how the backpack travelers go about their road trip. But there have been some positives. For example, I can wake up and go to work without having to worry about making the bed in the morning. I can just walk into any food joint and eat something and need not bother to wash the dishes for dessert. But the best is yet to come.

A nice calm beach. Setting Sun. Seagulls hovering around the pier. Kids building sand castles. Grown-ups having a good time. And you in the middle of it after having a difficult day at the office. It is difficult to imagine such a scene in the middle of a city. However, it is true. Tucked away in a corner of San Francisco's busy Fisherman's Wharf is one such little beach. No sign of frenetic activity and a picture of perfect serenity. When you are sitting by yourself in such a setting, its difficult not to relax. As the breeze blows I see this pretty lady in a miniskirt that is too short to keep the chill out but is of the right length to warm me up (without the need of a jacket). And then some more pretty girls (who need jogging just as much as a fish needs a mobike) jogging by in their designer jogging suits. Nice. Just cross the street from Ghirardelli Square and there you are right on this waterfront. I guess the city civic officials try hard to maintain such pockets of sanity intact. Full marks to them.

Discovering such spots that isolate you from the hustle and bustle of the city and providing a moment of peace is enough to make such long travels worthwhile. Thus said Confucius.

Dis-CERN-ing Universe

Finally, 20 years of hard work of Physicists and Nuclear Scientiests from all over the world will see the light of the day at the CERN (in English, it translates to European Organization for Nuclear Research). They have come up with this mother of all accelerators called the LHC or in their terms the Large Hadron Collider to conduct the mother of all experiments. Not that I am a theoretical Physicist or even vaguely connected to anything nuclear (or nukular as some like to call it) but then I put my finger into everything that’s not my business. What the heck! So long as nobody’s complaining, I wouldn’t worry too much.

So they end up building this large circular tube like gizmo called the accelerator which has a few kilometers radius and spans across two countries (France and Switzerland). And now on September 10, 2008 they are going to conduct the first of a series of experiments to discover what happened at the Big Bang (or the creation of the universe). By “they” I mean a bunch of bright Physicists from all over the world and mainly from Europe. Sorry, I tend to be vague sometimes. I am sure that this LHC is one heck of a boy’s toy. Nice. Let’s hope they come up with some great results too that would end up re-writing our Physics textbooks. Its darned boring to read the same stuff over and over again.

What also interests me is the data they are going to come up with and how they are going to sift through it. Seems one single experiment will end up generating a lot of data. And then some. By a lot, I don’t mean that it will fill a few pages of a Lab Book or a few Lab Books but enough to fill around 100,000 DVDs. So the Scientists are going to use “Grid Computing” or Distributed computing to analyse this data. I first heard of this at a conference last year where HP showcased their servers some of which are installed at CERN. Once the experiment is completed, the data will be distributed across different computers across the world and each one will analyze a fragment of this data and send it back to the central computer at CERN. I can’t imagine how they can come up with such kind of ideas. But it does sound real cool. CERN has been nice enough to put much of this stuff on their website (http://cern.ch). So for some days to come, I am going to keenly follow what’s gonna happen. So while I am still trying to figure out why the sky is blue, Scientists have gone ahead figuring out how the sky and earth were created or what elements created them. Needless to say, we live in interesting times.

Fighting the Su-do-ku Mafia

A group of my friends are good at Su-do-ku. I call them the Su-do-ku mafia. They solve the online su-do-ku at http://www.websudoku.com (category: hard) in under 4 minutes (the average time taken by users is under 5 minutes from the stats shown). The average time for me is around 20 minutes with a record of 13:54. So when I talk about my times with this mafia, I get a lot of faces that seem to say, “peasant!”. Well, all brains are not alike. And I am still trying to work on my times. Brain-training as per Nintendo DS is a long time-consuming process and takes time. Earlier on, when I started on sudoku, I used to have a heavily scratched sudoku sheet in the daily newspaper because one way or the other I used to skew up the grid by filling it up with completely wrong sequence of digits. I guess my logical brain is not as developed as Einstein’s but so long as I can add digits when I go to the supermarket, I’m fine with it. Speaking of which, I have noticed that I can add numbers faster in my head now than before. I surprised a grocer by adding more than 10 lines from item price-list (which included weird change amounts) in head faster than his calculator. Nice. Perhaps, Sudoku has helped in other ways. Hope I get to improve my times and surprise my friends too.

And its not over yet. After that, its the Rubik’s cube for me. And there’s a story behind why it will be Rubik’s cube next. I was once waiting for a flight in the airport when I saw this kid around 10-12 years old who was tossing around the Rubik’s cube as if it was some sort of a toy he had become long tired of. His Dad who was sitting beside me took the cube mixed it up for almost a minute and handed it back to the kid. The little whizkid took a look at it and solved the cube in 3 minutes flat! Cool! It should not be that difficult if a kid can solve it. I will too. Someday. But first let me beat the su-do-ku mafia.