As I mentioned last night, I learnt about “ambigram”s while reading a book by Alex Bellos. For our purpose, we can say an ambigram is a calligraphic writing such that when you hold the paper upside down, you get the same writing!

That is quite an achievement! I looked up the internet and found some free ambigram generators. I am trying to learn how to write an ambigram of my own name.

It does get your mind to think in a different way when you are practicing every stroke. Basically, you have to think how that stroke will look when you hold it upside down and is it going to build up the other letter you need to build up. (The letter that is as far from the end as is the one you are writing from the beginning). So while writing my first “R”, I have to do it in a way that if I turn it upside down, it should look like the last letter “y” and I have to draw the exact opposite of how I wrote “R” in the end to write “y”.

You will see that after half an hour of trying, my output is still amateurish. You can even spot the mistake I made in the last letter. I also realized that I need to get a thicker nib from the calligraphic pen set than I did this morning.

After storm Zeta and learning the Greek alphabet, I had this crazy idea – albeit not too crazy as far as my ideas go – what if I tried to learn the script of another language?

I remembered, while in Mongolia, I had great difficulty reading their language. So, figured maybe I should try some language with a Cyrillic script. Settled down on Russian. The language has 33 letters and 10 vowels. Eventually got the hang of the upper case and lower case. The pronunciation was a different thing though. There are lots of sounds that are not there in English language (some are there in my mother tongue Bengali). A lot of the letters look like English but have nothing to do with the corresponding English letter. I am still struggling with the difference in pronunciation of “Й” and “ы”. All in all, was interesting to pick this up. I am going to keep trying to identify the letters in words and pronounce them thru the end of this year.

So, with English, Bengali and Hindi (based on Devnagari script), that makes it 5 different scripts for me. (I am not counting German and Spanish since they are too close to English).

Thinking of picking up one more. Tamil has a very different script. At one time, I had taught myself the script (back in 1985). Maybe I will brush that one up…

I was reading up on Pi (the ratio of circumference to diameter of a circle) – in a book by Alex Bellos – and realized how little I knew about this number and how fascinating it is.

For one, all my life, I never realized that Pi can be expressed by this simple formula. Frankly, my first instinct looking at the series was that it does not converge – let alone add up to exactly one fourth Pi !

Ramanujan – who I had heard a lot about when I was growing up in India apparently created a famous formula for Pi – which I did not know either. I was aware of the Ramanujan numbers but not of his work on Pi. The remarkable part of the formula is that right at the outset if you put n=0, it gives an accurate value of Pi to the sixth decimal place! If you put n=1, it will add another eight digits of accuracy to the value of Pi and so on!!

Fairly scary looking formula though:

Modern computers have calculated Pi to – hold your breath – 2.7 trillion places!! To put this in perspective, if we used just 39 places, we can calculate the circumference of the circle that can circumscribe the whole known universe to the accuracy of less than an atom of Hydrogen!!!

And yet, no patterns of repetition (of any set of numbers – two-digited, three-digited…. million-digited …. and so on) has ever been found in that sequence. Thus we know one thing – Pi is NOT a rational number.

Another interesting data and I will let you go… If you start narrating the digits of Pi, you will not encounter a zero in the first 10 digits… or 20 digits… or even in 30 digits. (It comes as the 32nd digit – and yet, the first 200 billion digits in Pi have been studied for distribution – all of them occur in very similar numbers!!)

This is data on Covid spread in India. Fascinating data.
1. 70% of Covid patients did not spread the virus to ANYBODY. On the other hand, 10% of Covid patients caused 60% of the spread of virus.

2. The second one is even more fascinating. It is the young adults who are spreading the virus most (I assume that is because they tend to be more social and gather in groups?). And people tend to spread to other people of similar age as their own (I assume because people tend to congregate with folks of similar age group)

(Source: The Economist)