MS in US: A Year Later

This is the continuation to my previous blog: Buckling up for MS-The Story so far.
To recap the blog a fresh MS aspirant after lot of efforts and hardship (physical and mental) landed in US and now the story continues.

Surprisingly even though US is a huge landmass and depending on where you land the experience may differ but everyone still shares a similar journey. Let me play Dumbledore and pull out the some thoughts off of an MS aspirant in US for the first time. (These thoughts transcend gender bias)

• How come every car is behind the other in a single line? These guys seem to be really disciplined drivers.
• Almost all roads are like highways!
• Black or Nigger is taboo. Use African American
• Anyone who walks by me greets me!
• Remember the wolf from looney toons cartoons with jaws open and tongue rolled out and eyes popping out watching the seducing dancer come on stage?: girls and their attire
• After getting over jet lag all there has been is look for assistantship, look for part-time job, look for apartment, and look for roommates….hufff….

• Some Americans are really very fat! No wonder they are the biggest consumers, literally.
• African Americans –babbans, Mexicans- makhlu, chinese or Japanese – chinki White Americans – amru, gore; American born confused desis(ABCD) ….
• Need to improve my culinary skills, food is expensive here!
• Better get used to western toilets quickly. Tissue please
• Can’t have a mobile unless I have SSN….
• Thank God there is laptop in this world. What would I do without one!
• Z is not pronounced zed but zee!
• It’s a law to mow the lawn in front of the house and keep it clean!
• Coin operated laundry: Hate the dryer, shrinks all my clothes
• People pick their pet dog’s poop with tissue and throw it in the dustbin!!!!!!

• Coffee to go or food to go sounds so much cooler than pack the coffee or pack the food.
• At least 15% tip in restaurants, barber’s shop, and cab! Money hungry thugs!
• What??? If more than 4-5 people go to a restaurant 15% tip is compulsory!!! It can be seen in the bill as gratuity!!! Insane…
• American food: So bland…
• McDonalds is not the same as it was back home :(
• Finished a subway footlong! Never thought I could eat this much!

• Honking is considered rude!
• The streets are so empty…
• Only a handful of national holidays…
• Driving: Aarrgh ! I hate the discipline…
• Oops I am driving on the left lane, I missed a stop sign. What!!!Now I have to yield for vehicles before merging into traffic!!! Why can’t I just make a cut and whizz away…
• There is no signal at a cross road just a stop sign and still the traffic is regulated without a cop controlling it!
• I want to see exactly how and when does my credit history build… arghh

• What’s with the thanksgiving shopping craze! Stand in line at night and wait for stores to open in the morning! Sounds interesting! Things people do to get stuff cheap! What the hell its worth all of it!

• Indian street: Reckless drivers honking, Indian restaurants, groceries, saree shops, pan shop along with Pakistani restaurants and shops. Feels at home.

(Region dependent thoughts)

• Why aren’t people more excited about first snow?
• Four to five layers of clothing every day, it’s so irritating.
• I don’t want to go out for groceries I just came from outside… Again put on all that clothing … arghhh
• Enough with the snow already, its been four months now. No wonder people were so excited with first snow!
• Temperature today is >0 deg C: Yay! It’s a beautiful day (Now I know what this phrase actually means!)

• Got a mail from someone asking me to evaluate his chances in my university…he he I was in that place a year ago…. I better reply quick as I know how anxious aspirants can be since I was one.
• Forgot to reply, somehow got busy, can’t even find that mail now…. And I was thinking the senior who did not reply to me a year back was a jerk… but I guess it happens. :P
• A new batch of students joining…it’s amazing how I am a senior to them even though some of them are elder to me by age, by experience….. I guess it’s because I have one year US experience. :P
• Better start preparing for full time job interviews/internships…..
• One year done and I hope more to come…..

These were some thoughts roughly summing up the experience of living in US for a year. Dumbledore is tired now. But feel free to dig in to the magic pot and pull out some more thoughts….

Old Memories

Someone knows

Amidst rocks in dry weather grows a flower
how will it grow? how will it survive?
But alone is not the flower; someone knows;
With tender care, He will look after the flower

Sorrows in our life make us helpless
But someone full of life knows and comes to help us

The dumb cant speak their plight out
Who will take care of them?
But worry not; Someone knows;
He will lend his ear to their speechless mouth

Worries, suffering disease; all of them we suffer
But some one knows about our pain
Alone we are not in this world,
Someone takes care of us, someone knows....



Among giants

Walking through a crowd holding,
her mother's hand
on street among giants

A little girl I saw
lifting her head to see faces
making an effort to do so

She said (I assumed) - What a world this is !
With such big giants walking on streets,
Lucky to me I have my hands firmly held to mother,
On such a crowded street among giants....

The Life of E

I met him long back, maybe when I was in high school. He was one of those whom you see but never really know much about, moreover never really care too. Somehow I got curious about him and decided to meet him in person. When I got to know about the number ‘e’ I found out he has been around for quite a while. The world has been cruel to many constants. All this while he had been doing his job and helping others without getting due credit for. So I decided to write his story for everyone to read. Here goes…

Man started counting and came up with decimal numbers to count. Soon followed a flurry of numbers rational irrational real even complex. But E remained hidden for a long time. A lot of people like John Napier and Huygens came close to discovering this gem of a number but it wasn’t until Jacob Bernoulli that the world got a first glimpse of the number. Bernoulli was trying to find the value of

This is the exact number e. However Bernoulli used binomial theorem to find out the value being between 2 and 3. But that’s it. So the credit to discover e can only be given to Euler. It was Euler who named the number as e. (I could see a sparkle in the eye of e when he talked of Euler.) Euler gave an approximation for e to 18 decimal places,
e = 2.718281828459045235.
It was Euler who pointed out the connection between sine and cosine functions and e. E always knew he was different but Euler brought out his usefulness in front of the world. May be that is why he proudly calls himself Eular’s number.
Unlike E, pi and phi have their perpetual share of glamour. Pi is still a craze with mathematicians. The recent accolade phi has got because of its closeness with nature its even being called the divine proportion or the golden number. Enthusiasts have tried to link phi with every known wonder to man. People have pi clubs, phi discussions; both have thousands of books….. When I queried him about this he was totally unperturbed. Modest as he is, he always somehow keeps away from the news I feel the world has been unfair with a lot of constants like E.
I had the honour of going through his resume. I was completely over whelmed. E being an irrational number is also transcendental i.e. he is not a root of any polynomial with integer coefficients. ( refer article 1: refer article 2)
It’s like a saintly quality for a number. Ever wondered why

Well the slope of the curve e^x is equal to the value of the curve at that point. e^x has a curve like no other number. E being uniquely and exceptionally curvy maybe explains the apathy of women towards him! This rather unique characteristic of e represents the idea that all continually growing systems are scaled versions of a common rate. Needless to point out which is this common rate. e shows up whenever systems grow exponentially and continuously: population, radioactive decay, interest calculations, and more.


There is a reason why logarithm to the base e is called a natural logarithm. e is the unique number with the property that the area of the region bounded by the hyperbola y = 1/x,the x-axis, and the vertical lines x=1 and x=e is 1.In other words,

He is the only number when considered as the base, the logarithm can be defined as expansion in Taylor series, i.e.



The word ‘exponential’ comes from him. E is the gateway that connects imaginary numbers to cosines and sine’s, the logarithm gets a new meaning from e. E is very adjustable too, he can be expressed as a Taylor series, as a limit of a sequence as an infinite continued fraction or as power series!
After I met e I had a new found respect for the credibility of that guy. There’s is lots that I found about him and there is a lot more for me to find about him. E is the essential part of this world. Engineers, bankers, statisticians and many more cannot do without e. E works on different levels with all of us. Let’s give him his share of support and acknowledgment


More about E

Various forms of E

Facts and Trivia


The story of E: Life of e video

Crazy about e
Thrillers on E
Occurances of E in unusual problems
Properties of Euler numbers

1
2
3

A Collage or graffiti of stray thoughts

A painting can depict a state of mind. Cant words depict the states of mind?
How do you define mind? I don’t know. Has it got something to do with your thoughts?
Why does your writing always have to be disciplined to form a structure. A stray thought can be penned so why not pen thoughts correlated or uncorrelated.
A work of art portrays the mood of the artist. I want to be an artist, create something may be a collage of thought.
The happiness and satisfaction of creating something is very satiating. Did I use the right word? Well I wanted to use something related satisfying but may be satiating is stuck somewhere very close to it in my memory.
I wonder if the brain works like a RAM. Actually if we knew how we store thoughts we would be able to compress data so efficiently. But we tend to forget things so data retrieval technique of the brain is not the best technique.
Does this forgetfulness bring randomness in my actions and thoughts? Like I did with satiate and satisfy?
Can we explain our actions and feelings from our thoughts? More importantly feelings.
Or does randomness just makes us more human? May be it does. May be things were meant to be with a little randomness. I recall Huygen’s Uncertainty principle here.
A thought also passes my mind whether anyone who reads this will be able to make sense of any of this? Thats why structured writing is important. But hey this is my graffiti. Believe it or not this is art.
Coming back to randomness. Maybe our attempt at making things deterministic is wrong. May be the whole philosophy that everyting perceptible is just maya, is right. May be the world is indeed a sandbox which we can mould as we want.
Imagine the day we start believing this how different the world would be!

And a passing thought tells me herein lies the fallacy of my assumption that a graffiti of thought can be modeled to an art form. But to convey something specific you have to be disciplined.
So does it mean a thing of beauty is anything that is disciplined? What about the good old saying, beauty lies in the eyes of the beholder?

………………………………………………. :)

I do realize this can turn into an epic with no end. So I will stop now.
How much sense do we make out of something sensible and how much sense can we make out of something seemingly senseless? Many a times an endeavor to make sense of senseless is more interesting and rewarding than comprehending the sensible.

:)