Good morning

I woke up just now. Lying in the bed. And for no reason I'm feeling a bit lonely. It's not like I don't have friends and I'm really lonely but still as I said for no reason. May be it were the dreams. I don't remember what were they like. Most of the time I don't. Just after I wake up, it's gone! Like it were in a different, parallel, world. Anyways the point was I was feeling lonely.
It is not like im suffering or something. For a change, work wise things are going great. I would not say great, but not bad. Learning some new things. Started getting some results. Hitting my head on a big code in C which has absolutely no documentation. New a advisor has been good so far. Group members are many europeans so it has been tradition of starting with euro cup matches on big screen instead of presentations.
Anyways I need to do something about it. But I don't know. May be I will just wait for the feeling to go away. I have a new road bike but I haven't taken it out yet. I think I need to go out more. May be. Btw if you haven't read Nikola Tesla's biography it is great. Just because the man was great. It is very inspiring.

Country obsessed with cartoons

Country obsessed with cartoons. That is what can be concluded of the following list, which by no means, is exhaustive.

Jayalalithaa joins chorus against cartoon in NCERT textbook

Now Karunanidhi wants cartoon removed from NCERT textbook

Controversial Cartoon on Dr.Ambedkar?

Professor's cartoon was murder threat: Mamata - The Hindu

Regret

I have realized that we always regret more for things that we don't do than things that we do. Do more. Regret less.
I had been at this awesome food truck who really know how to 'cook' vegetarian food. Potter's pasties and pies they call themselves. The Thai Veg Pasty was close to any Indian stuffed carbohydrate dish. Like Samosa. Sesame short bread sweatdish with basil syrup was also delight. They dont make as good pie as I have had.
I am up to a nice and ok working schedule in my work. I have observed a very well document fact about productivity vs day of week. Like you would see in PhD comics kind of websites. They are not comic imagination. It is real. It is friday evening and I am trying to finish reading some stuff ('A numerical method for solving the 3D unsteady incompressible Navier-Stokes equations in curvilinear domains with complex immersed boundaries' for those who are curious to know what) and not able to stick to it.

On SMS and subtle corporate war

Nice article. Nice overview of things if you are willing to believe. In times when media is flooded with myriad of opinions it is difficult to decide whom to believe.
I would rather chose him (author).

http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/lead/article3494081.ece

A king who chooses to ignore the first principle of statecraft that the royal staff must be tapped — and, tapped hard — once in a while should be prepared to be called corrupt.

SMS stands for Sardar Manmohan Singh.

New lab

So I started work at new lab today. Officially it was first day. Group meeting at 2:30. I was there 5 min early. I realized that people started arriving from 2:30 and in next 5 minutes there were 12 people in the room. I introduced myself to everyone. A gentleman from Iran was disappointed in me because he thought (from my name) that I was a female student. So far being used to hearing gazillion different ways to pronounce my own name there comes the new one. Have you watched the movie Lord of the rings? What was the name of the main bad guy? Does it sound similar to my name! :) Remarkably, although so small a group we spanned all of globe in nationalities. We covered the countries: United States, Spain, Greece, Iran, Russia, China, India, Vietnam, Korea. Holy damn, that's 9 countries! We could have held international peace conference in that room!

2 hours into the meeting I realized that it is serious stuff and I am sitting with highly qualified people. The lowest completed academic qualification in the room was Master's degree. Average qualification in the room was beyond (hand-fully beyond) Ph.D.

This summer is going to be crucial because end of summer will be decisive about my stay in the group. One thing is for sure I have a lot hard work ahead. Only to catch up with these guys. I am excited about it. After all that was what I wanted. Right now I am reading a book on tensor algebra. Future work involves programming in CUDA on GPUs. I am waiting for all this to come. I've got my office set up in there. It is in a room which does not smell much of human habitat. Everyone in the room could have heard the key-strokes of my computer. Most of the lab-mates sit in different room. This facility is off campus, some 15 blocks away. Which means that it is difficult to meet folks I used to hang out with in the main campus. Isolated. I have to travel 2 miles more everyday. Everything has its price. On optimistic note this may be worth the price.