Points to Ponder

Been a long time since I last put anything up here. I'm rather caught up with work these days so here are some interesting questions for you to ponder on in the meantime.

Enjoy!


1) How long did the Hundred Years' War last?

2) Which country makes Panama hats?

3) From which animal do we get cat gut?

4) In which month do Russians celebrate the October Revolution?

5) What is a camel's hair brush made of?

6) The Canary Islands in the Pacific are named after what animal?

7) What was King George VI's first name?

8) What color is a purple finch?

9) Where are Chinese gooseberries from?

10) What is the color of the black box in a commercial airplane?


So you think you are smart eh?

Typical day with machines

Spam News

I'm doing some experiments today and taking some measurements. In between each set of measurements I have to keep an interval of about an hour for the machine to cool down before I take the next set of readings. I need to take about 5 sets of readings which means it's going to take 5+ hours of the day, and in between those readings what do I do?

First hour or two I managed to finish off tit-bits of other unfinished work, play a game of sudoku, arrange my desktop folders etc. Then I opened my junk mail folder to sort through the junk and to see if some non-junk mail has been wrongly accused by the mail authorities. Fortunately there wasn't any, however one mail title caught my eye

"Afghan bomber kills Bush"
This sudden suppressed laugh/murmer escaped me. Seems the spammers are being creative nowadays. They are probably begining to realize that the old fashioned 'remedies for bodily defects', 'designer wear at low prices', 'free tickets to watch Oprah', 'Winning a lottery ticket in some remote land' and of course 'the death of an unknown relative who left you a million dollars' is now a bit too known to their victims.

So they are coming up with new ideas to get those people to click! And of course who can resist "Afghan bomber kills Bush" I have to give credit to those spammies, that title looks very tempting!

Bruno's Sculpture Garden, Marysville

As promised here is a glimpse of the Sculpture Garden that we had the good fortune to pay a visit to.


Bruno is a Belgian expat with a talent at making sculptures that are a bit on the funny side. And just like his sculptures he too has an unusual sense of humour. Most of his sculptures are made out of Terra cotta along with some day-to-day accessories.

The fun part of it is exploring through his rather overgrown garden. There you get to meet various creatures and people in every nook and cranny, some hidden away among the bushes, some having a bath in the ponds and puddles and some up in the trees.


An alligator on the rocks


This one is a bit creepy... it's located such that it catches you off guard


The mouse man....take a closer look (below picture)


How many mice can you count?


Carved out of a tree


If you follow the sound of the music, it will lead you to this man


A handful of water


Pocahontas


The bird man


A Yogi


We started off the morning visiting this place, so needless to say the whole day was invigorating!

The feeling that someone's watching you.....

My cubicle is located in a rather inconvenient place, kind of in the middle of a big room where the exits of the room are located such that people walk right behind me. Since the day I sat here I've noticed that some people and when I say some I mean only 2 or 3, tend to shot a glance towards my computer screen when walking past this point. But not everyone did that (so I thought) and since I myself often found casting a glance or two at other's screens when I'm walking past theirs, I didn't really take much notice of these 'peeks', until I changed my wallpaper.

It was a close-up of a cute little puppy looking playful, that filled my computer screen this time.

First it was my supervisor,
"I like your puppy"
"huh?.., puppy?"
"yeah the one on your desktop"
"Oh!"
hmm.........so he's keeping an eye on what I'm doing.....Caution!!!!!

Next the admin lady
"Oooh! nice one!"
"ehh..thanks"

Then later in the day comes this professor who hardly notices anything!
"Oh that's cute! Is that your puppy?"
"(me smiling) no it's not, but I wish!"
"hahaha...."
Oh god!

And of course the other students
"Awwww"

"Hey! a doggy!"

"Cuuute!"

Gheez!!!! This is pretty creepy!

Word of advice: Always keep a spreadsheet (filled with thousands of data values) or some complicated graph (for me a spectrum: which nobody can understand) always ready to be 'maximised' when needed.

A bundle of ......physics??!

I got this mail just a couple of days ago from a former researcher in our centre (Me being a newbie, have never really met this one). Apparently his wife has given birth to a baby, and he sent this mail to his former coleagues to let them know of the big news!

(I'm not displaying his name just for privacy sake!)


Hi all,
I just wanted to tell you that since 07.02.08, 4.52 am (german time) N----- and I are not alone anymore: With 4390 g distributed over 54 cm, we named our son Ruwen (pronounced: Rouven, hebrew: "behold, it is a son"). The boy is well and the mother is recuperating: with 39 cm head circumference he has a "bullhead".
I hope you join us in our happiness!

XXX

It sure looks like he could do with a break from work!!

Good Advice

The photo looks a bit blurry, because it had just cleared after a heavy downpour.

Just my luck!!!!!!!

After waiting for a whole week, just to get my turn at the SEM (Scanning Electron Microscope), I arrived at the Research lab with my precious little samples, well ahead of time so as not to waste a single minute of my booked 3 hours! .....no...it's not plenty of time to get work done.....these high resolution imaging stuff takes ages for a scan!

And if I don't manage to extract all the information I need within this 3 hours, it might be another week before I can find an available time slot to continue my work, the SEM seems to be in very high demand.

So the person who's responsible for the SEM, let's call him Dr. H, was kind enough to explain to me how it all works before he began scanning the samples for me. And again no....we are not encouraged to 'do it ourselves' with this sophisticated piece of equipment which is worth $$ big bucks $$!!! So there's this Dr. H who operates it for us.

So, all was good and we were just about an hour into our work, took some images of the sample surfaces and was getting into the more interesting and important part of the work when suddenly the computer got stuck!!!

hmm...ok, so he did what he would normally do, shake the mouse a bit....sit patiently for a while....shake it again.................no response.......Esc.......Enter.......shake the mouse again (this time a bit impatiently) and now the mouse was also stuck!!! .....now that's weird....

When we came to the point of realization that the shaking is not going to work, we had to Ctrl+Alt+Del; once,...twice.......thrice....still nothing..........so Dr.H got really impatient and he kept pressing hard down on the keys till it shut down!

And then restarted it...but this time it wouldn't log in! The computer has gone seriously bananas!!!!

And it's not just a stand-alone computer, it's linked to the SEM, so we had to abandon my work!!!!!!

And my precious samples are still stuck inside the SEM! and they will have to stay there until some service people come down and figure out how to fix the system. Grrrr!!!**&&^# I wonder when that's going to be.

The SEM has been functioning very well for the last couple of months and just my luck it decided to crash right now!!!??!!

The joy of experiments!

During the most part of this week I've been locked up inside laboratories doing some very delicate experiments, with the "Laser on" warning light going on outside the door, so that others would think twice before disturbing.

Everything was going very well, and I was feeling very productive for getting so much done within a couple of days, and was just about to wrap up the first stage of my set of experiments. I only had to do an extra set of analysis of the teeny weeny Silicon samples that I prepared so carefully...and patiently!

So I put them under the microscope, which is connected to a PC, a CCD camera and a spectrometer. After adjusting everything, I hit the "Acquire Data" button on the software programme. Tuk..tuk....peep...tuk..tuk....peep........that's the spectrometer analysing the sample and the computer outputting the graph....after a few minutes of tuk tuks and peeps, the computer showed me what the final graph looked like........... "What the...??!!!*&^#"
I didn't need my well experienced colleague to tell me that that is not what we are expecting!

hmm...ok, so back to the begining, adjustments......laser, camera, focus the microscope, cables...etc etc.... ok! Hit the button "Acquire Data"
tuk...tuk....peep...tuk...tuk....peep......

Final graph...."Darn!! What in the world is going on?"
So we were running around the set up, scratching our heads trying to figure out what's wrong.
After about two hours of tampering around, we discovered that the laser we were using was 15 mW in power, which is about 50 times more than what it should be!!!!!!!!!!!
How the hell that happened we don't know, but what it means is that not only were we subjecting our eyesight to potential damage but were burning holes right through my precious samples all this time!! Oh Joy!!!

Ali-gata Pera

Came across this by chance yesterday.

Ever wondered where "Ali-gata pera" (in Sinhalese) got its name from? It surely doesn't have any connection with Elephants..?!

Well....... due to their rough green skin and since its shape is close to that of a 'Pear' it's also known as "Alligator Pear"!
:)

Bushism

Found a good book Mr President?

• The attack on the world trade centre in NY

-"Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we."

• Flattening out Afganistan in the search for Bin Laden

-"The most important thing is for us to find Osama bin Laden. It is our number one priority and we will not rest until we find him."

after some time...... when they couldn't find a trace of him

-"I don't know where bin Laden is. I have no idea and really don't care. It's not that important. It's not our priority."

• Iraq

-"We found the weapons of mass destruction. We found biological laboratories...for those who say we haven't found the banned manufacturing devices or banned weapons, they're wrong, we found them."

I see....I wonder where they are now?

-"Free nations don't develop weapons of mass destruction."

“Governments accountable to the voters focus on building roads and schools—not weapons of mass destruction.”

The U.S. has over 10,000 nuclear weapons

-"Oh, no, we're not going to have any casualties [in Iraq]."

-"We are ready for any unforeseen event that may or may not occur. "

-"I have made good judgments in the past. I have made good judgments in the future."

-"These people are trying to shake the will of the Iraqi citizens, and they want us to leave...I think the world would be better off if we did leave..."

Finally he's talking some sense

-"Iraq and Afghanistan ...are now democracies and they are allies in the cause of freedom and peace."

yeah right!

• Refusing to sign the Kyoto Protocol

-" It isn't pollution that's harming the environment.
It's the impurities in our air and water that are doing it. "

-"I know the human being and fish can coexist peacefully."

????

• Hurricane Katrina

-"One word sums up probably the responsibility of any Governor, and that one word is, 'to be prepared'."

That's only one word

-"Brownie (Michael Brown of FEMA), you're doing a heck of a job."

I wonder why Michael Brown had to resign from his post.... becuase his handling of the situation was so good?

• Foreign Policy

-“I don’t have the foggiest idea about what I think about international, foreign policy.”

Tell me something that I don't know already!

• General

-"The vast majority of our imports come from outside the country."

-"If we don't succeed, we run the risk of failure."

-"For NASA, space is still a high priority."

I didn't know that NASA has other priorities..

-" Quite frankly, teachers are the only profession that teach our children."

hmm.....

-"The problem with the French is that they don't have a word for 'entrepreneur'."

'Entrepeneur' comes from the French language..

-"'There's an old saying in Tennessee — I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee — that says, fool me once, shame on — (pause...confused look) shame on you. Fool me (pause...) you can't get fooled again.'

-"To the C students, I say you too can be president of the United States."

-"I'm the commander — see, I don't need to explain — I do not need to explain why I say things. That's the interesting thing about being president."

-"I believe God wants me to be president."

I wonder whether He's is the only one..?

-"God told me to strike at al-Qaeda and I struck them, and then he instructed me to strike at Saddam, which I did, and now I am determined to solve the problem in the Middle East."

Never have I seen such an entertaining president..in the history of the world

:)

Dictator of the (so called) Biggest Democracy

Democracy or Dictatorship?

In 2002 Bush decided to attack Iraq, why?..... because they had weapons of mass destruction hmm.....
The UN opposed, the American public opposed, the general public of most other countries including Britain, Australia and France protested. Jacques Chirac heavily condemned and so did the Pope... but did that matter to Bush? .....nah!

Since then everybody has been talking about when the troops in Iraq are going to be withdrawn. Just a few weeks ago, after a lot of drag, the US passed a congressional bill to withdraw troops from Iraq, only to get De vetoed by Bush...




Thanks Powell, I couldn't have said it better!

:)

An interesting blog

We found this very entertaining blog

http://www.ranjitfernandosucks.blogspot.com/

so thought I should spread the word... :)

Handy game

Click to enlarge


Good idea to keep a printout of this one whenever you are attending a seminar or presentation,
in case you get bored.. :)

Mr. Bean is Back!

Mr. Bean is upto his old mischief again. And this time he has won a lottery ticket prize - a trip to the south of France, Cannes. All he has to do is get down from the train in Paris, take a taxi to the next train station and take the express train direct to Cannes. It's simple really!

But leave it to Mr. Bean to complicate life's most simple things and get himself in a real jumble! And knowing just one French word "Oui" meaning 'yes' doesn't help things at all!

The film was simply hillarious! It's a good one to just go have a good laugh at, because this just might be the last Mr. Bean movie to come out. Rowan Atkinson has mentioned that he had done all experiments with Mr Bean so that it might be the time to call it off.