Fluttering Flies of a Spotless Sight!

I am not crazy! And in all likelihood I am not going blind either. Its a relief because I had seriously begun to consider going to an eye-specialist and/or a mental hospital regarding what I have been calling "transparent patterns in front of my eyes" since my childhood. Well, actually I haven't been calling them anything at all. Not very frequently anyway. I don't remember talking to many people about this thing even though I have always seen these patterns in front of my eyes and must've spent a million hours following them. One reason was that I always assumed that it must happen with everyone. The other was that I was probably afraid that if it doesn't happen with everyone then I might sound pretty crazy trying to explain what I was seeing. No, actually it was just the former, not latter. :) Because I never realized how difficult it would be to try to make the other person understand what I was seeing if he/she has never seen them. I remember telling about them to some friend of mine at IIT. That was probably the first time I told about them to someone and even though I don't remember his reaction exactly, I know that he was finding it difficult to understand.

Khair, this thing came up again a few days ago when me and NS were sitting at home doing nothing at all. So, we started talking about random things and suddenly one of the patterns caught my eye. So, I ended up asking him if he also sees similar patterns. He doesn't. Whats more, he had absolutely no idea what I was talking about. At first he thought I was just talking about the retinal image of anything that you see, which takes some time to vanish and might appear as a transparent "ghost" image when you close your eyes. Trouble is, I can see these patterns all the time. No need to close your eyes or go to a dark room. Also, the patterns move around with the eyeball making them VERRY difficult to settle down in one place. The clincher argument differentiating these patterns from any retinal image was that the patterns are not "rigid" i.e. they move relative to each other as well!! This got me thinking. Is this thing bad? Should I worry about it at all? At this point I knew two people who didn't have a clue what I was talking about and none who did. So, I decided to try someone else. Someone else called Rashmi Tyagi urf Indu urf my dear sis. Same result. So, I got the answer. I SHOULD worry about this. Three out of three is statistically significant enough.

Yet, it made sense to put Google on work at the problem before spending my not-so-hard-earned dollars on consulting someone who might end up laughing and saying, "That happens with 99.99999% people. You probably found the only three people in the whole world who don't see them." Turns out that this is a not-too-uncommon condition called muscae volantes (which is Latin for "fluttering flies", hence the title :) ), or more commonly (and VERY appropriately), Floaters. The corresponding article on wikipedia actually described it extremely well. Like it says, "The temptation to try to look directly at them is almost irresistable. However, attempts to shift the gaze toward them are frustrated, because the floaters follow the motion of the eye, and remain to the side of the direction of gaze." That is SO true!! :)

King of all tyros

I still remember the day (and I make sure that Mathur doesn't forget it either) when I played probably my only game of cricket in my 4 year-stay at IITB. If not the only game, it was the first game there at any rate. The team was chasing a reasonably steep score and I was sent as an opener (as everyone, including myself, expected me to get out after one, maybe two, balls. So, the equation won't change much and the harm I could do to my team would be minimized). It turned out that most of my teammate went back trying to score quickly and I, for some weird reason, was still out there. Slowly, I got into my groove (the one which I have never gotten into since then... :) ) and started hitting some booming strokes. Whats more, some of those strokes were hit on Mathur's bowling who happened to be an inter-IIT team bowler. (THAT'S why I don't let him forget it!! :D ) . Anyway, we won in the end with the general opinion being that I was the man of the match (even though Abhishek Mishra - a good friend of mine - scored probably just as much as I did and was batting with me at the end) .

So, why did I suddenly come up with this story today? Because something similar (though probably on a MUCH smaller scale) happened today. People from one of the clusters here decided to go for bowling today. Now, normally I am not too much of a "playing" sort but it seemed a good idea to go with my labmates just to meet other people of the cluster. Needless to say, I had NEVER been to a bowling alley in my life before, let alone bowl myself. So, what happened? I came back with a trophy, of course! :) Our team was the best out of the six teams there. And I scored a cool 112 out of our team's winning score of about 430. :) The hand has started to ache though and I probably won't be able to type much over next few days.. :( But what the heck, I can bask in the glory for now!

King of all tyros!! :)

What is a movie trailer?

The "standard repository of all the knowledge and wisdom in the universe" aka Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy has something to say about movie trailers. See another fun trailer of the movie here.

back to normal

spending 24 hour with a blogger-gone-cuckoo was a torture to the soul. The only respite on a no-food-no-water-no-blog-mahashivratri-day came from some good music (non-rahman for a change). RV recommended Morning Raga for the carnatic classical music lover in me. And even though one can't help but notice the pretty average sound quality (maybe its just on musicindiaonline, though I think I didn't quite like the instrumental arrangements too), some of the songs were superb. specially the one that RV had recommended (Mahaganapatim 1 - by Bombay Jayashree of Vaseegara/Zara Zara fame).

Back in India, rain gods saved Pakistan some serious 2nd-day blushes. Though, by the end of the day Veeru Dada had already done enough to make them dread day 3.

Chalo. just one century each by veeru, dravid, sachin and laxman (and maybe a fifty by saurav). main zyaada naheen maangtaa!!!

Blogger the bugger!

Blogger has been playing stupid little games today. Not only it has made me post the same post thrice (and maybe this one too!), its not even allowing me to delete any of those. As of now, blogger tells me that my blog does not have any copy of that post when the actually there are three of them!! :(

Template change!

So, the Harry Potterization of my blog is proceeding at a fast clip. As you can see, like any other self-proclaimed HP fanatic with onlinepresence, my page also has the countdown ticker on it! :)

Hail JKR! :)

HBP covered!

The cover arts of three editions of Half Blood Prince have been released! See the US edition cover here, the UK children's edition cover here and the UK adult edition cover here. All courtesy Mugglenet. Now why is "Advanced Potion Making" such an important book? hmmmm........ interesting....

Also, it is now confirmed that there's going to be a new Minister of Magic. Not surprising at all!

Sky or Ocean?

Just saw today's APOD. It is a panoramic view from the top of Mt. Everest. The explanation accompanying the pic says that the local name of Everest - Sagarmatha - actually means "forehead of the sky" in Nepalese language. Does anyone know if this is right? Because in Hindi "Sagarmatha" would mean "forehead of the ocean/sea". I think it is unlikely that "Sagar" means sky in nepalese when it actually means ocean/sea in hindi.

The Truth!

As you already know, I decided to show Satya to my labmates in our march movie show. I was pretty apprehensive initially. I didn't know whether they'll like it or not. So I gave them three options. Satya, Iruvar and Maqbool. Told them a little about all the three movies. ZL thought Iruvar is the best option because its DVD cover picture seemed the most cheerful (AND having Aishwarya Rai on the DVD cover doesn't hurt either!). But, as expected, no consensus was reached. So, finally, I had to do what I didn't want to do. Use my discretion. And I chose Satya.

Before the movie started, I warned them about some things that they might find too unusual in the movie. For example, the more "dramatic" performances than similar movies of hollywood. Also, the song and dance sequences. What I forgot to warn them about was the length of the movie. So, the most common comment at the end of the movie was "wow! that was a pretty lengthy movie!". That can never be a good sign. So, I thought that probably I made a mistake in selecting Satya. However, since then I have heard some complements about the movie from them. So, it wasn't a bad choice after all.

My advisor thought the movie was good (and even asked me to select another indian movie when I get my turn next) and thought provoking. I prodded him by asking, "didn't you think it was too slow?". But he came up with a gem of an answer to that. He said, "It probably was. But that probably made it better. There are a lot of times when I feel that a movie might've been much better had the makers spent more time developing the plot. So, fast is not necessarily good. For example, Godfather was slower than an average movie, but it was that much better because of that." THAT made me happy. :) Then another labmate told me that initially he didn't think the movie would be as involving as it later turned out to be. So, that reassures me a little. The next movie (whenever my turn comes... in a few months) will probably be Roja or Kannathil Muthamittal. Or maybe Iruvar. Lagaan goes out the window because of the length. They'll probably kill me if I tell them that I planning to show them a nearly-four-hour movie. Maqbool will not be a good choice now that they have seen Satya. They are very similar in genre and feel.

Even on this occasion, Roja was my first choice but I couldn't find an english-subtitled DVD in time. I hope I can find it before the next turn.

How to make a FOY!

So.. What is a FOY? Read this and try to see if you can figure out by the time the story ends.

To huaa yoon ki on this tuesday we had our lab movie night. So, we were watching Satya. Close to the end of the movie, there was a scene where the subtitle didn't have the best possible translation so that most of the people actually laughed at the scene. I thought this calls for a longer translation, so I started explaining. I said, "The subtitle wasn't really good there. What he really wanted to say was..." and continued speaking for some time. Everybody was looking at me and listening attentively. I noticed that the looks on the faces of my audience (that consisted of two Americans, two Puerto Ricans, one Russian and one Chinese) were both attentive and confused. Then I looked at my advisor who was sitting right next to me. His look was more confused than attentive. In fact, I realized it was almost completely confused. Which made me slightly more attentive, which made me realize that I was actually speaking in HINDI!!!! :)

God, that was hilarious!!! And embarassing. Everybody suddenly exploded with laughter. I had no idea at what point I had switched from english to hindi without even realizing it. Then they told me that the only part they understood was "What he really wanted to say was..." :)

So, again.. what does FOY mean? "fool of yourself" of course... what else...