When I visited Mongolia this time, Roger introduced me to a book “Tuva or Bust”. If you have not read that book, chances are you would not know that there used to be a country called Tannu Tuva (kind of northwest of Mongolia). Or that the Noble prize winning physicist Richard Feynman never fulfilled his wish to visit that country in spite of years and years of efforts.

That got me thinking about how little I knew about countries. Actually, my knowledge of countries is pretty much stuck with what I had learnt (and how the world looked) during my school days – so let’s say mid 80s. Even then, I was terrible with countries from Africa.

After coming back from Mongolia though, I did make some effort to learn about the new countries that have formed in the last two decades or so. Previously, I could not even place them in the world map. Now I can. I am still struggling with the names of their capitals though.

I cannot give you this puzzle without ruling Sharmistha Kolay out of this game. She is a whiz kid when comes to geography. Not only can she name each and every country by continent and place them in a world map, she can name their capitals and …. get this… tell you what their flag looks like. I have never met anybody like her.

So here is the puzzle… I will name some newly formed countries… and you will have to name their capital. Try it by yourself. And then Google them up. How many did you get?

A. Countries that formed when USSR broke up:

-> “The Stans” in Asia
1. Tajikistan
2. Turkmenistan
3. Kyrgyzstan
4. Uzbekistan
5. Kazakhstan

-> Between the Caspian Sea and the Black Sea
6. Azerbaijan
7. Armenia
8. Georgia

-> In Europe
9. Ukraine
10. Moldova
11. Belarus
12. Latvia
13. Lithuania
14. Estonia

B. Countries that formed when Yugoslavia broke up:

15. Serbia
16. Bosnia Hercegovina
17. Montenegro
18. Macedonia
19. Kosovo
20. Slovenia
21. Croatia

C. Other new countries

-> Africa
22. South Sudan
23. Eritrea
24. Namibia

-> Asia
25. East Timor (Timor-Leste)
26. Palau

-> Europe
27. Slovakia
28. Czech Republic

BTW, I could not even reach the one-third mark!!! How many did you get?

Finally for the bonus question… and maybe we will open this up to Sharmistha even… Have you heard of a country called the Republic of Artsakh? Look it up!!

Continuing with the learning of the Dark Continent, managed to nail all the African capitals in two different tests in first chance.

Forget my knowledge in Geography… trying to memorize names everyday for about 20 minutes might be a good way to stave off age-driven memory loss issues.

Also, who knew there are cities called Ougadougou, N’Djamane, Mbabane or Bujumbura? That was a lot of fun!

Ramesh Krishnan, your turn now. (For the rest of the readers, Ramesh beat me on the African country test by almost a whole minute!)

Once I finished memorizing all the African countries, I asked myself if I could extend that to learn all the country names in the world. Naturally, I started by Googling “How many countries are there in the world?”

You would think it should be a straight forward answer. Far from it. The definition of a “country” is not as clear cut as I had thought it would be. There are countries that the UN recognizes. Then there are are completely autonomous areas with their own government and no control from outside – but they do not go for UN membership (e.g. Cook Islands). Kosovo is not a recognized country by UN, but it competes in the Olympics as a nation.

In fact, if I have this right, there are 195 sovereign states recognized by the UN, 201 partially recognized states, 204-207 de facto sovereign states, 206 Olympic nations, 211 FIFA countries and get this – 249 countries that have their own ISD (country code for telephone numbers) codes!

Anyways, finally memorized the names of all the nations recognized by the UN. Trying to understand the definition of continents was a trifle more tricky. Learnt some really interesting tidbits about continents. See how many of these you knew:

1. Which continent is Greenland in?
2. Which is the continent with the most number of countries?
3. Which is the continent with the least number of countries?
4. How many countries have contiguous area that straddles over two different continents?
5. This one is specially for my friends who live in the USA like me. How many countries in our continent?

I have finally been able to memorize all the country names and their capitals. For this purpose, I am defining countries as those 195 that are recognized by the United Nations. Some interesting puzzle questions emanate from that:

Take a guess at these questions and write down if you want in the Comment section. Then check with Google (or wait for a day – I will publish the answers). Do NOT write the answers here AFTER Googling.

1. The smallest number of letters in any country capital is 4. For example: Rome. How many such 4 letter country capitals are there? Can you name them?
2. How many countries have the capital name same as the country name? e.g. Singapore capital is Singapore. How many can you name?
3. Now, some capitals are the same as the country name with the word “City” attached. e.g. capital of Mexico is Mexico City. Similarly, what are the other countries that have the same pattern of capital names?
4. Many countries, during their early ages, had certain cities flourish because of trade – that happened mostly thru sea waters. Thus you will see many of those countries have a port as their capital. Some of them even have the name Port in their capital name. e.g. “Port Au Prince” for Haiti. What are the other capital names that you can come up with that have Port in it?
5. Many capital cities were named after certain Saints. They tend to have names starting with St., San, and so on. How many of them can you come up with?
6. Which are the capital cities that start with the letter “Y”?
7. How about “Z”?
8. Which is the most common first letter for capital names? Meaning more capital names start with this letter than any other letter. There are an astounding 25 of them!
9. A couple of countries have an apostrophe in their capital names. Can you name them?
10. Now the final one: What is the capital (legislative capitals) of Sri Lanka and Myanmar? Hint: I did not realize that they had moved their capitals recently.

In a bit of sheer lunacy, I find myself to be an owner of a unicycle. Not exactly a proud one, mind you. More like a very fearful one. This thing looks weird, feels weird and frankly, there is a reason it conjures up images of a circus when you look at it. Because it is weird. The first reaction you are bound to have upon seeing it will be “Hey, you are short by a wheel”.

My younger daughter has gone one over CDC and imposed a rather punishing 20 feet social distancing with me now!

The genesis of this lunacy harkens back to a bar in Dallas. Yes, all my stories start from a bar somewhere. That is how I committed to the Mongolia trip (at a bar with Roger) and that is how I committed to riding motorbikes (at a bar with Magesh). This particular bar involved John Mcgehee – my friend, philosopher and guide when it comes to running. Sitting at that bar on Nov 28, 2015, we discussed (as you can see in my blog of that day) “how to bend the curve for my 50s”. I distinctly remember discussing how we lose balance (the reason old people fall down so much) and what we can do to not lose that rapidly.

I had been thinking about that problem for some time – undoubtedly sitting in bars – how to keep the sense of physical balance intact. The part about simultaneously coming across as having lost my mental balance was sheer brilliance from my side. Come on! I am 54. If I cannot afford to look like an idiot now, when will I ever?

A unicycle topped the list. Balancing on a dolphin’s nose came close second. But finding a co-operative dolphin in the rural parts of Georgia is only slightly easier than finding somebody who wants to accompany you to a Chinese wet market these days.

This contraption is very tricky. You just can’t sit on it. If you try, it will simply roll away from under you – forward or backward. Regardless, you are highly likely to find yourself having a painful tryst with the hard ground below.

I am realizing that learning something new at the age of 54 is hard. I must have gone thru 20 youtube videos on how to get on to a unicycle. My first day was all about keeping the unicycle against a brick (so it would not move), press on one pedal and just step over to the other side. No movement of the bike involved at all. All I had to do is clear the seat and step on to the other side. If I fell, it could not have been for more than a couple of feet. Yet, you will be surprised, how I froze up every time I tried to transfer my body weight from the ground to the pedal.

After about five minutes of desperate attempts, managed to get it done once. Mind you, I was not even attempting to sit! Just go over to the other side. Did a couple of times more successfully and decided to call it a day. I was shaking for a clear fifteen minutes after that. I was so scared.

Most experts say it will take me 30-50 hours of constant practice to figure out how to stay on top of a unicycle. At the rate of 15 minutes practice, 4 days a week, I am thinking it will be around next year I might figure out how to go around a few feet on my unicycle.

The astute amongst you have no doubt realized the irony of my risking falling down at this age… when that is exactly the risk John and I were discussing how to reduce.

It is going to be a long journey. Hopefully, I will not hurt myself too much.

If only it came with another wheel!

(I realize you are laughing now, but once I become an accomplished clown on a unicycle in a famous circus, we will see who laughs then)

After a long time, the three musketeers hit the road with the motorbikes. As always, Rakesh planned out the trip and led the caravan of three. And Avi stayed behind as the sweep to keep me safe. It was an absolutely enjoyable ride. Altogether, a little over 120 miles (200 km).

Of course, the serpentine roads up in the mountains kept me on my tenterhooks. Made a terrible mistake once of not relaxing my body and leaning the bike enough on a right turn. I had not slowed down enough, got scared and stiffened up and slipped over to the other lane for about 30 yards. Fortunately, there was no traffic from the other side.

When we stopped at Burnt Mountain look out point, while parking the bike on a steep climb, managed to earn my first distinction of “laying the bike down”. That is a euphemism for dropping the bike. Not sure what happened, but the motorbike leaned over while I was backing it in to park and I could not pull it up. Rakesh quickly came to help me. When he learnt that this was the first time I had laid my bike down, his only remark – after some 25 years of motorbiking was – “you have a lot of catching up to do”.

We started fairly warm in the sixties (I still had five layers on). But boy, it got real cold up in the mountains and the strong wind was making me wonder why I had not put another layer on. I think Avi bore the burnt of the cold temperatures – I believe he had less layers than me.

I am still bummed I made that mistake. Almost will make me go back there by myself and keep my speed under control this time (which is much lower than other motorbikers on the road) and make all those twists and turns once again without that mistake.

The view from Burnt Mountain Lookout Point was awesome. First time saw Stone Mountain and Kennesaw mountain. It was a cloudy day but perhaps the lack of pollution with all this shelter at home gave a clear line of sight to mountains that are 70 miles away from Burnt Mountain (as the crow flies).

Like I mentioned before, being short by a wheel is no fun. Yesterday, I was finally able to repeat the simple act of stepping on to the unicycle with my left foot, putting my body weight on it and swinging the right foot to the front of the unicycle and get off. In normal life, it won’t be that easy for a learner. I used a prop so that the uni could not move backwards.

The Youtube video suggested doing this many many times and then try to tap the right pedal with right foot before getting off. This part is very tricky since while tapping, if I managed to put any pressure, the wheel would move forward and fall under me. And that is exactly what happened once.

Finally, I was able to do the right foot touch right pedal routine once.

The biggest achievement for me though was that I put the helmet the proper way this time 🙂

On an aside, do you remember how, in January, I had gotten out of Doha airport for an hour to meet my friend Natasha Balseca? And I met her mother Gina who was visiting her from Ecuador?

Well, I found out that she is also learning how to ride a unicycle during this stay-at-home period. I think she is way advanced than me at this point. But I might have somebody who can give me company in learning this and some pointers as a recent learner!

I must have been at it for 20 minutes today. After many attempts, managed to get both feet on the pedal twice – for a fraction of a second. Even a glass of wine did not calm me down! This thing is going to be a long learning cycle…

Don’t laugh now!

My love for programming has an origin in boredom rather than any computational skills. Certainly, studying computer science introduced me to the art of converting a mathematical formula into all caps FORTRAN. Somehow, though, punching cards and putting it in a queue for the card reader to read overnight was vaguely pointless to me.

It was one of the summer vacations that I got bored at home in the second week and went to Kolkata to find a summer job with a computer company (Artintel). That is when I realized I loved programming. The act of writing voluminous pages of code in a garrulous language called COBOL was not the point. Watching the computer spit out something that people were actually using (these were simple programs to control inventories, payroll etc) was somehow very rewarding though. Plus we had the only air-conditioned room in the whole company. This was in the middle of the heat of summer in sultry Kolkata, mind you!

As my computer science degree progressed, I realized my brainpower was not cut out for research or all the sophisticated computer stuff that my classmates like Madhav Marathe would do in their sleep. Did I mention that there were a lot of Greek alphabets in those courses?

Not wanting to do research meant I had no interest in the USA. (Irony, huh?). But I liked the MBA courses. There was something about Organization Behavior and Managerial Oral Communication that left a deep impression on me. Yet, coding is what I really liked. I remember being part of a team (with Raj Subramaniam, Rupa Batra, G Ramesh et. al.) which did a fairly impressive project in building a computer system to manage railway traffic. Admittedly, my team mates did most of the hard work. But I got to use my color pencils to draw project charts!! (I still have a picture of that project plan on my dorm room wall).

When most of the folks from MBA progressed to Finance and Marketing jobs – where they could actually use all the lessons learnt in MBA, I went back to coding. My first project – CPC – was a life changing experience. Met two of my best bosses – Nitin Chandekar and Raj Sundaramurthy – and an incredible set of team members. My coding was probably not what I was remembered for – but that color pencil pie chart showing how much time we were wasting waiting for the compiler to finish is still something that my two first bosses talk about.

While I came to the USA to code, somewhere, somebody finally realized that I was not that good at coding after all, and put me in a management track. To fulfill my own Peter’s principle and rise to my level of incompetency.

I have not coded for over 20 years now.

Lately, after stopping my posts being cross posted to Facebook, I have focused some attention to my blog site. I started bugging my friend Larry Mason often to ask how to change parts of my site that I did not like the appearance of. Color pencils, sadly, did not work.

Eventually, I realized that maybe I should learn another new skill at the age of 54. Actually re-learn. I figured I am going to learn PHP and CSS to do simple tricks with my website. Larry was kind enough to point me to the source (w3schools).

Sat down to learn it and I realized that I have to start from “deep defense”, as it were. So, had to learn HTML first (about 20 years after the rest of the world picked it up!!).

So, here I am, totally excited after finishing the HTML course and sitting down to figure out how to do CSS coding. I am almost at a point where I can do what I could do with color pencils anyways.

You may laugh now!

The other day, the weather forecasters warned us that Storm Zeta will be going thru where we live. Which got me thinking how many storms have we had this year? US storm naming has an interesting pattern. Every year we start with the letter A (first storm is named starting with A – it was Arthur this year) and then go thru B, C … The names alternate between male names and female names. The starting name alternates between male and female every year. Did you know you can submit your own names to NOAA?

Back to the count. There are no names with Q, U, X, Y, Z any year. So, there are 21 names every year. What happens when we have more storms like we did this year? Turns out, we give up all pretensions to innovation and go straight for Greek Alphabets – Alpha, Beta etc etc.

Back to Storm Zeta. The Greek letter (upper case) for Zeta is “Z”. This is where my confusion started… Did we have 45 storms this year? (21 English names and then 24 letters in the Greek Alphabet).

It was Sunjay Talele who reminded me that “Z” is only the sixth letter in Greek Alphabet. Which, in turn reminded me that, once upon a time (my ninth grade to be precise), I had found all the Greek letters enumerated in a page in the back of the Oxford Learner’s Dictionary my dad had bought for me. I had even learnt them by rote.

I figured, 40 years later, might as well learn once more the letters and how to write them in lower case and upper case. After four days, I can now write all the letters backwards (omega to alpha) and can ace all the quizzes on Greek Alphabets – at least the ones I could find on the internet.

Will see how much recall I have a week from now…

The confusing letters for me included eta (“H”), zeta and xi (cannot write the letters in English script). And I always get confused with “o”. Tend to think of it as omega rather than omicron.

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…

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.

Took the motorbike to Ballground for a ride and coffee. While there, had a call with my good friend Anand’s wife Firouzeh (who is from Tehran, Iran) to fine tune the proper pronunciation of the Farsi alphabets. I think I am within striking range for most of them. Other than the two alphabets “ghain” and “qaf”. They are pronounced identically – and I can’t get it.

In Bengali and Hindi, we have a letter for “gh”. There is no single English letter for it but it is pronounced like “gh”ost. I asked Anand (who knows Bengali and Hindi pronunciations) if he could gauge how close the pronunciations were.

He said something to the effect of if Sharmila were to strangle me and I were to try pronouncing “kh” (the second letter in Bengali/Hindi), then I might come close. On second thoughts, I will give it a pass…

Have now learnt all the Farsi alphabets and how to write them. To be sure, when I say “writing”, I mean as the letters would be written by themselves. When actually written in cursive handwriting, the shapes can differ depending on whether they are the first letter, somewhere in the middle or the last letter in a word. I have not learnt those. I need more practice still. (If I can rattle off and write backwards – meaning last letter to first letter, I feel I have memorized well enough).

The two letters in red have the same pronunciation but I cannot pronounce them. See a funny suggestion from Anand here.

Acquired a passing acquaintance with Farsi letters. To be sure, I still cannot get the right pronunciation for “ghein” or “qaf” (identical pronunciations, I am told). And I know only isolated letters. But it was good enough to read a signboard inside the local Bezoria restaurant yesterday. (Needless to say, normally I would have no idea what the word meant but the context was helpful in understanding the word “shawarma”).

So, here are the six language alphabets that I have learnt arranged reverse chronologically of when I learnt them.

Thinking of learning Thai letters next. They almost look like notes on a music sheet (another thing I cannot read, of course).

Now learning Tamil. I used to be able to read Tamil in the late 80’s. Should be a faster learning cycle this time…

I had learnt Tamil once about thirty years back. So, this one was a lot easier. Farsi has been the hardest so far. You can see how uncomfortable I am with writing right to left. I take more space per letter and cannot keep a straight line…

Thanks to Gagan and Bharti’s push when they were visiting Atlanta a few weeks back, Sharmila and I finally took the plunge and started learning how to drive a boat (safely). And consequently, enjoy some more time in the water. One day of lessons and hands on training later today was the first time the two of us took a boat out in the water for a few hours!

I have a feeling I will like this hobby and I have to give a lot of thanks to Gagan and Bharti for getting us here.

In terms of picking up skills in the last fifteen or so years, for me, the scorecard looks like this: (you will notice that most people learn these skills much earlier than me)

1. Long distance running (moderate success)
2. Mixology (moderate success)
3. Motorbiking (moderate success)
4. Unicycling (complete disaster; gave up)
5. Flyfishing (did not keep up; need to get back to this)
6. Skateboarding (still a beginner, need to put in more hours)
7. Driving motorboats (too new)

Went for a typewriter show and tried a few. I think I am zeroing in on what I want. In all likelihood, a portable Royal (e.g Royal Arrow). Last time I had typed on a real typewriter was in 1983. After my tenth class exams, I had started going to a typewriting class in Benachity.

That old feeling of tactile feedback came back all over again. (Very different than computer keyboards). Also got to know Tom – who is an absolute authority on typewriters. He has a collection of over 100 typewriters. That matches my fountain pen count.

But unlike my fountain pens, he makes some serious money by simply renting out his typewriters to movie sets!!

After hearing Prabasaj-da talk about canoeing, I had developed a more than passing curiosity about it. Never got around to taking the plunge. Today, woke up very early and went to Stone Mountain Lake to get the first taste of canoeing in Prabasaj-da’s canoe. In the process, learnt the difference between a canoe and a kayak!

It was very serene at 7 in the morning with near still water! Loved the experience. Might be yet another thing I will get into!!

By the way, I wore my brightest orange shirt and bright colored life vest to leave nothing to chances in terms of others spotting me if I fell in the water 🙂

The first successful cappuccino with foam and all that! This is after at least half a dozen failed or semi-failed attempts before this.

After putting all those currency notes under the table glass top, I had thought of sitting down and trying to learn all the modern currencies of the world. This has turned out to be much easier than remembering capital names and much much easier than flags (which I am still working on at a slow pace).

See how many of these you can answer. Since the definition of “country” can be a bit subjective, the scope of these questions are the 195 countries in the UN (193 members, 2 observers).

1. What is the currency used by the most number of countries? (US and Canada both use dollars – but they are different currencies with different paper bills – US Dollars and Canadian dollars)

2. If you found the above easy – try this: which is the second one?

3. A surprising number of countries have “dollars” in their currency names (e.g. Canadian dollars). Can you take a rough guess how many of them have it?

4. What would be your guess as the next common word in currency name? How many countries would you guess? I am talking of same currency name but differentiated by its region or country name. e.g. “rupee” is used by both Pakistan (Pakistani rupee) and India (Indian rupee)

5. Speaking of the rupee, and this surprised me – how many countries have the word “rupee” (or its close derivative) in its name?

6. There are many countries which have its own currency – but also use US Dollars (e.g. the Bahamas). But there are other countries than the US that use US Dollars as the only currency. Take a guess how many and who are they?

7. What would be your guess as the shortest currency name (without attaching the country name in it)? How many letters? How many of them would you guess are there?

8. This might be a hint to the previous question. How many countries have currencies that are only 4 letters?

You can find the answers here.

After memorizing the names of countries, their capitals and currencies (got stuck with the flags with one third done), tying to now learn about the Top 50 Rivers in the world (by length). Learnt some fascinating facts. There are about 10-12 rivers in the Top 50 that I had never heard the name of!!

See how many of these you might get. The answers are posted here.

1. Which is the country that has most number of rivers in it? (The answer might surprise you)
2. Which country has the most number of Top 50 (by length) rivers running thru it? (It is a whopping 11 of them!)
3. Which river runs thru the most number of countries?
4. Which is the largest country with no rivers at all? (It used to have one long time back)
5. Which is the longest river entirely in one country? (Hint: Second longest such river is also in the same country)
6. Which is the river that has the most number of country capitals on its banks?
7. Which river has two country capitals bang opposite to each other on the two banks?
8. Which river (in the Top 50) has a country capital on it that is an anagram of the river name itself (but two different words)?
9. The longest river is the Nile. The widest is the Amazon. Which is the deepest river?

And finally a controversial one… since Guinness Book of World Records withdrew this category. So I am going by the recorded length of all rivers in the world.

10. What is the shortest river in the world? (It is barely 18 meters – yes meters. Apparently, if there is a constant flowing water, it is considered a river. I could find at least 7 rivers that are not even 100 meters long!!)

Imagine this… you have to stay completely silent for 2 weeks. This is not like your silent retreat kind of thing. You are home. Free to go around doing your usual stuff at home and office as long you do not use your vocal chords. This is due to a medical surgery – but you are guaranteed full recovery at the end of it. So, you do not have to worry about health complications from this.

Well, this is what I am going thru.

Of course, being silent means I have to slow things down. Also, I have a bit of extra time at hand since I cannot do any strenuous physical exercises – so no running or gym and all that.

Now, my question is – how would you use this as an opportunity? What are some of the ideas you have for me that I can use this to come out with a better version of me?

So far, I have started learning ASL. What else?

I actually liked it a lot. I remember my friend Anamika used to do this (does she still?). I always wondered how it would be to try it myself. Now, I know!! Next skill to learn coming up?

These days, I have found a great way to learn more about country flags. My friend in office – Danny – is a wizard at this. He asks me questions. I get stumped and then I learn. I come home and learn a few more countries and go back and ask him next day. He answers them without even blinking. My upside is that in the process, I am learning!!

There is another friend of mine Sharmistha – in Houston – who is equally adept in world flags!

Someday, I am going to be like them. Right now I am grinding thru it – one flag at a time…

Here are some interesting things I have learnt…

1. Most all flags are rectangles. However, 2 countries have square flags. Can you name them?

2. Here might be something most people know. Which country has a flag that is neither rectangle nor square?

3. What is the most common color in all the country flags? It is found in a whopping 75%+ flags!

4. What is the most rare color in country flags? How many countries have them?

5. Which country has had the most number of flags?

6. What was the least amount of time that a country flag survived before it was substituted?

7. Which country has the oldest continuously used flag? Celebrating 400 years this year, in fact!

8. How many countries have the front side and the reverse side of the flag different from each other?

9. In the 1936 Summer Olympics, two countries showed up to compete and realized they have the same flag! Next year one of them made an alteration to their flag. Which two countries were these?

10. Many countries have images of arms – often symbolising their struggle and sacrifice for independence. Saudi Arabia’s for example, has a sword. But there is one country that has a AK-47 on its flag!! Can you name it?

Answers posted here.

Woke up sharp at 5 am, blithe as a lark and went about my early morning routine. Vitals measured and noted down, classical music put on in my study, logged previous day’s 64 point updates, wrote in my journal, made my first cappuccino and settled down in my chair. Suddenly, I heard Sharmila screaming from our bedroom upstairs:

“Rajib, are you around?”
“Yes. Why?”
“I think the dishwasher is beeping. Need to call the mechanic. Can you switch it off?”.
“Okay”.

Hmmm…. now what do I do? I started wondering. You see, that high pitched beeping noises were not coming from the dishwasher. (admittedly, I was impressed with her confidence without doing any debugging).

It was actually me, on my new learning spree. So, about a month back, I took it upon myself to learn Morse code! I know, I know, in these days of GenAI, I could not have picked up anything more anachronistic. After a month of learning my dots and dashes, I got myself a Morse code machine. And that is where I was trying to spell out different words. Not sure what is so dishwasher-y about it.

Anyways, I went back to practicing after connecting the audio output to my headphones.

Eventually, her coffee was ready and she came down. I was hoping she would have forgotten the incident.

“What happened to the dishwasher?”

My burgeoning hopes were summarily … err… “dash”ed!!

I took her to my study and showed her my Morse code machine.

Have you ever noticed how people driven to exasperation involuntarily put their arms on their hips with their palm folded around the wrists? A visage like that was the last recollection I have before I heard her say “You are a quirky man”.

Helplessly, I sat there grinning to myself with no re-Morse whatsoever! I am going to keep learning this…

So there.

Ha! (that would be dot-dot-dot-dot dot-dash to you)

Here is one of the interesting things I learned while picking up Morse code. I can’t believe I have lived all my life without realizing this.

What does the term “SOS” stand for? Growing up, I always thought that it stood for “Save Our Souls”. I believe I first heard this while reading about the story of the Titanic. Some think of it as “Save Our Ship”.

It turns out that “SOS” is not an abbreviation at all. About 75 years after Morse code was created, around the start of the 1900s, the Germans helped set a universal distress code: SOS. They chose it because its Morse pattern [… — …] was easy to recognize. Before SOS, other distress signals were used, with “CQD” being the most common.

So, SOS does not stand for any English phrase. And even if it did stand for something, it would have been very likely a German phrase!

Did you know that?

When I first got started with cappuccino and all that, my friend Raghu from Austin had sent me this contraption to make South Indian coffee – often called “filter kaapi“. Now, this is something I grew up with during my college years since I did my engineering in Chennai.

This year, one of my goals is to learn how to make good “filter kaapi“. Today was my first attempt after looking up a few YouTube videos.

The result of the maiden venture has been distinctly un-South-Indian-like. Followed all the instructions, and then I was left with only half a tumbler of totally diluted coffee. I might have had some more coffee in the cup if only I had not spilt some in the basin while trying to do that South Indian frothing thing with some panache!

If you are not aware of what I am talking about, you have to look it up. Those guys in the coffee stalls in college would throw the milf-coffee combo from high up in the air from the tumbler into the dabarah – without spilling one little drop.

I need to call up Raghu and Prabha and get some tips on how to make the coffee thicker.

[P.S. My second attempt fixed the volume problem but not the thinness problem]

A few weeks back, as a next step to my madness, I decided that memorizing the periodic table would be a worthwhile enterprise. I do not think I ever went beyond 25 elements in school.

As of this morning, I can finally narrate the entire periodic table of 118 elements. Forwards and backwards, for good measure!

Now, for a couple of interesting questions, try this:

1. “Q” is a letter that no element has as a starting letter. Actually, it is not there anywhere in the spelling of any element. There is another such letter. What is it?

2. What is the most common starting letter for the elements?

3. This is for my US friends. How many elements can you name whose symbol is the same as some state in the United States?

Some time back, I got this strange idea to learn and memorize various things. That has led me down the path of memorizing country names, capitals, flags (not finished with this yet), Morse code, the periodic table, and what have you.

Right now, I am learning and memorizing all the US Presidents and their election years.

In keeping with current political movements, I am calling this quirky exercise of mine “Occupy Brain Cells” 🙂

I think I will be done with the Presidents in another couple of days.

Looking for new things to learn and memorize. Can you make some suggestions?

Nearly five years ago, I read this book, “Beginners,” by Tom Vanderbilt. In fact, I had written a review of it here. One of the many memorable learnings from there I had was that “The brain wants to be puzzled and learn something new. It likes learning for learning’s sake. Taking gaps in learning – and making mistakes again – solidifies learning.”

The point is that when you are learning something now, take a break after some time. And then come back to it again. The brain is rechallenged to learn, but already has a better basis. Making mistakes again and recognizing that the same mistakes were made before actually cements the learning in the brain for later recall.

I recently put that to the test.

About nine months back, I spent some time learning Morse code. As you can imagine, it was not easy for an old guy like me, and I would often confuse myself. After a few weeks, I stepped away from it.

And then picked it up again earlier last week. On the first day, I recognized some of my old mistakes (”F” and “L” – which one has the dash in second place and which one has it in third place? Or “G” and “W” – they are opposites of each other, but which one has the dot in the front and which one in the end?)

Funny thing… From day three onwards, it has been perfect recall. Every single time. I am reading sentences and writing them out in Morse code (by hand, not with a Morse machine) without making a single mistake.

Fascinating how the brain works.

Many moons back, my friend Mita Basu had introduced me to this game – travle.earth. The whole idea is to travel from Country A to Country B by crossing only land borders. There are some quirks in the game – It thinks of Siachen Glacier as a country, it does not think you can cross from Morocco to Western Sahara by land, and for some reason, it will not let me go from Poland to Russia directly, although I have been to their land border myself (exclave of Kaliningrad).

But I have now reached the 1000 game mark without failing once. And I am ready to move on to my next geography game. First, I have to dig through my messages from Mita. About a month ago, she sent me another game that I haven’t opened yet!

If you want to learn about country boundaries, this is a great game to try.