20 July
2019
20 July
2019
The (other) Roy family!
20 July
2019
The long wait was totally worth the wait!!
Last time Partho and I did some physical exercise together was back in 1989. Playing soccer in IIT-Chennai!! While he was a year junior, we had studied multiple times in the same school and college and thus got to know each other very well. in college, we were in the same dorm and in fact only about 6 rooms apart. I moved to Room 239 and he moved to the room I had before – 233.
The last time I saw Partho was in 2001 in Austin when he brought his sister – Paromita – (I distinctly remember his red Mazda Miata) to the hotel Sharmila and I were staying in (Four Seasons on river Guadalupe used to be our favorite weekend getaway then) for a Sunday brunch. Pinning down Partho thereafter has been a challenge. An incorrigible introvert, getting him to return my phone calls was harder than straightening out a dog’s tail. That said, this year, he did call me back!!!
But I was closing in on him. Last week, in a post, I had talked about visiting Natasha in NYC this week. Paromita (his sister) had tipped me that Partho will be in town too to visit her. Made some re-arrangements of my flight and laid siege in his sister’s house from 8PM. After about two and a half hours of waiting for him, I was almost ready to give up. His flight had been terribly delayed. Just as I was getting ready to leave his sister’s apartment, he walked in!!
The expression on his face was priceless!!!
We were too thrilled to see each other! We have a lot of memories together from the past. We used to play music together (he was a vocal singer and I used to play the tabla), we played soccer for our dorm team and even college team together and then there were those evenings of reading Sukumar Ray’s “Abol Tabol” together and breaking out into peals of laughter!! How can we ever forget “Aay re amaar moida thaasa naadus re”? !!
It was too late for all of us. So, we agreed to meet early morning in Central Park, go for a run and catch up on the past years.
It was a great run!! Partho, as elusive as you are, meeting you is always memorable!! We have to do another evening of “Abol Tabol” session !!
19 July
2019
Hey! I know that face!!
Erin recently pointed me to a New York Times article that talked about how hard work and discipline leads girls to beat boys in school and the same thing leads them to fall behind in office. (If any of you care – here is the article: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/07/opinion/sunday/girls-school-confidence.amp.html)
I was reading some more follow up articles online when I ran into this particular one in Inc. Magazine. (https://www.inc.com/natasha-roy/tamara-mellon-jimmy-choo-company-culture.html?cid=hmsub1)
And recognized the editor immediately!! I know her!!
[Tagging Natasha]
18 July
2019
Morning run in Busse Forest with Speedy Dan
15 July
2019
Book Review: “Humble Pi”
You want to impress somebody at a party next time? Ask them to take out their phone and Google “Texas License Plate images”. You will find in the first two or three an image which has the space shuttle on the left top and the half crescent moon on the right top. Now ask your friends what is wrong with the picture of the moon. Most won’t get it. The problem is that there are a couple of stars too close to it. Try mentally drawing the full circle of the moon. It will overlap with two of the stars. How can that be? Just because we cannot see that part of the moon does not mean it is not there!!! You can never see a star in that zone!
Have you seen those road signs pointing to a soccer field? Check the soccer field image. In all likelihood, it is drawn out of hexagons. In fact, if I asked you to draw a soccer ball, you will draw it with all hexagons in it. And therein lies the problem. Mathematically it can proven that a sphere ( Euler characteristic of 2) can never be formed entirely of hexagon (Euler characteristic 0) regardless of the size of hexagons. In fact a soccer ball is formed of 20 hexagons and 12 pentagons!!
How about this? Have you seen those marketing pictures of three interlocking gears? Try Googling “three interlocking gear image”. There are lots of them (each gear is in contact with the other two). It may not strike you initially but such a combination is impossible. In fact in your mind, try to imagine that one of them is going clockwise… then the other two have to go anti-clockwise. But that cannot be – since those two are in touch with each other, they have to necessarily be moving in different directions!!
Did you know six F-22s when they were first released (at well over $100M a piece) while making a maiden voyage from Hawaii to Japan suddenly simultaneously shut themselves down? And could not be restarted for hours? (thanks to the mid air refueling planes, they never crashed). Turns out that they had crossed the International Date Line which completely messed up the programs in the onboard computers. So much for spending $100M+ per plane!
This book is filled with such hilarious and very interesting mistakes made by folks in the area of math, engineering and computer science. To be sure, many of those mistakes led to people losing lives and are not funny that way. But what makes this truly an enjoyable book is the author Matt Parker’s sense of humor. Australian born, settled in UK, he brings out all the subtleness of British humor.
This book is all about making mistakes. The dedication of the book goes to his wife… and it is written thusly:
“Dedicated to my relentlessly supportive wife, Lucie.
Yes, I appreciate that dedicating a book about mistakes to your wife is itself a bit of a mistake”
Touche!
Finally, the book’s page numbering is a count-down counter. It starts with page number 314. Which in itself is irrational thinking. (That is the value of Pi – to the nearest two decimal – which is an irrational number). But the book has more than 314 pages. In fact, the page after 0 reads “4,294,697,295”. Some of my fellow computer science students will realize that this is an error every 32 bit chip will make. And yes, there is a story the author relates how this completely messed up a mission,.
Thank you Somshekhar for recommending another great book!
15 July
2019
The last drop (off)
15 July
2019
Meeting him for the first time after he received the Presidential award!!
Sharmila and I got to know Kaushik when he was doing his Ph.D. in Georgia Tech. In fact, I believe it was my brother’s brother-in-law who had introduced us. We had had Kaushik at our house (at least once that I can remember) and then met him and his new bride – Anwesha at the Durga Pujo in Atlanta once. Then they moved to Boston. That was about 10 years back. The only other time I had met them was when I was in Boston for business many years back and we managed to have a coffee together at a cafe near his office.
After settling down Nikita, our next stop was to head towards Boston where Sharmila had to catch a flight for India. I remembered that on our way would be Needham – which is where Kaushik lives. They had a baby about 15 months back and I had seen his pictures – full of mischief, I might add – on Facebook a few times. A couple of quick phone calls and text messages and it was agreed that we would swing by their house on our way to the airport.
As I pulled up to their house, I could see a young kid with an elderly gentleman in the yard. That is why I realized that the grandparents were here too. (Turned out to be Anwesha’s parents).
I was good to see Kaushik. Especially after he received the US President’s Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers from President Obama in 2017, I was a bit afraid that he might not recognize me any more 🙂 Nothing of that sort. We felt as much at home at his place as we do at our own. Having Kabir (their son) around was total fun. He totally lived up to being as mischievous as the Facebook posts from Anwesha would suggest.
Coming to think of it, we would not have it any other way either.
15 July
2019
Time to say good bye to Nikita!
15 July
2019
