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April 30, 2005
Vishy's Vonderful Vitticism #3
A pick up line for linguistics geeks:
"Would you like to conjugate or are you going to decline?"
Posted by Vishy at 09:08 PM | Comments (0)
April 24, 2005
Useless Factoid of the Day #8: O say can you see, what a great irony?
When I came to the U.S., I was struck by how the culture seemed liberal and uptight all at once, particularly about alcohol and sexuality. You would hear of binge drinking in fraternities. Yet, the drinking age (21 in most states) is higher than in every other industrialized nation, and, moreover, is enforced religiously at bars and at colleges. Formerly taboo topics such as homosexuality have become fashionable in media and culture. Yet, in New York, late in the evening, you would hear on Fox 5 News, "It's 10pm. Do you know where your children are?" (Compare this to several European countries, where it isn't uncommon to find hardcore pornography being played on public access channels starting at 10pm)
Americans are very proud of their system of government (which, for its time, was a singular accomplishment) and by extension, their national symbols. Yet, a country founded apparently by freethinkers also featured conservative Puritan laws about alcohol and sex that hold sway in some states even today.
Consider my amusement then, when I saw this piece on CNN: http://www.cnn.com/2004/US/07/04/national.anthem/, I was beside myself with mirth.
That's right... The Star Spangled Banner was set to the tune of an English drinking song!
Here's the first stanza original drinking song, for those who care:
To Anacreon in Heaven, where he fat in full glee,
A few fons of Harmony fent a petition,
That He their Infpirer and Patron would be;
When this anfwer arrived from the Jolly Old Grecian
"Voice, Fiddle, and Flute,
"no longer be mute,
"I'll lend you my Name and infpire you to boot,
"And, befides, I'll infruct you like me to entwine
"The Myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's Vine.
See the rest at To Anacreon in Heaven
I think the U.S. national anthem would have been a lot more fun if it had been set to the tune of The Engineers' Drinking Song.
Posted by Vishy at 01:05 AM | Comments (0)
April 19, 2005
Useless Factoid of the Day #7: Habemus Papam -- Pope Names
Habemus Papam! (Lat., "We have a Pope")
German Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger was elected today as the successor to Pope John Paul II. The world was certainly grieving at Pope John Paul II's death, his papacy being one of the longest and most influential in recent Catholic and world memory. However, the focus from now on is clearly on the new Pope and the new era that begins after he takes over the reins of one of the most influential organizations in the world.
I'll spare my audience the painful details of conclave, which have been flashed around not only by newspapers and periodicals for the last month or so, but also by some *ahem* popular authors. (Angels and Demons, anyone?) This post concerns what happens at the end of conclave, when the new Pope has accepted his election (I am going to be unabashedly non-gender-neutral here until such time as there is even one woman in the college of Cardinals.). The newly elected Pope chooses a name for himself and is thusly wedded to the Holy See until death or retirement do them part.
I am not a Catholic, or even a Christian for that matter. However, aside from my passing interest in onomatology, I should mention that this post comes thanks to my teeny tiny audience, one of whom actually requested that I blog on the subject of papal names. It seems like my reputation as the World's Largest Repository of Useless Knowledge is taking on a personality of its own!
From some research on various Catholic websites and howstuffworks.com, I learned that the tradition of Popes choosing a papal name different from their birth name dates all the way back to 553 C.E., when Pope John II was elected. This Pope's birth name was Mercurius, obviously derived from Mercury, the Roman god. It was thought to be inappropriate for a Roman Catholic Pope to have a pagan name. Mr. Mercurius therefore renounced his birth name and assumed the name John II. Later, the Pope's choosing a new name was seen to be a symbol to his entry into a new life as the spiritual head of millions of Catholics. Popes typically assume names that honor their favorite saints or a previous Pope. Pope John Paul II chose his name to honor Pope John Paul I, his predecessor, who reigned for 33 days. Pope John Paul I had chosen his name to honor predecessors John XXIII and Paul VI.
Did you know that there has never been a Pope named Peter II? Ye Olde Peter I, also known as St. Peter, was the founder of the Roman Catholic sect and the Prince of the Apostles. In deference to his seminal accomplishments, no Pope has taken on his name. Apparently, the Prophecies of St. Malachy, an elaborate forgery perpetrated by some 15th century Jesuits, who had nothing better to do, say that the last Pope would be named Petrus Romanus.
Posted by Vishy at 11:37 PM | Comments (0)
April 17, 2005
Reality TV and Paranormal Movies
Reality TV is the ultimate expression of society's exhibitionistic and voyeuristic tendencies. Audiences watching so-called unscripted television in the U.S. have chosen a couple to get married (Married By America), or even watched a girl find her biological father from among a group of middle-aged men consisting mostly of impostors (Who's Your Daddy?). No doubt, reality TV has its attractions. Much as changes in media, bandwidth and connectivity have brought software development to the masses with open source and journalism to the masses with blogging, reality television has brought opportunities to be on TV to the masses. In the past, every loving housewife would tell her son he could one day become President. Today, every loving mother probably tells her child that it can one day be on reality TV.
Even talent-searching shows like American Idol, which have little to do with reality television at their core, try to blend in some elements of reality television to attract audiences. They try to take you behind the scenes of a talent search and even try to dramatize minor disagreements between the judges on that show. Believe me, I am not trying to see reality television in every show on TV. I have seen my share of talent shows in India, such as TVS Sa Re Ga Ma and Meri Awaz Suno during the cable TV explosion of the early 90s, which were utterly devoid of reality TV content.
The initial draw of reality TV was that characters on pre-reality TV behaved in a too-scripted way and seemed completely unreal. Although it beats me how putting a bunch of backstabbing Type A personalities on an island with limited resources is any more real, reality TV made audiences feel they could look into other people's lives in a way never before allowed by television.
There is a problem -- unscripted 'real' reality is mind-numbingly boring. I would argue that there have been many shows about real life on TV before the first season of Survivor. America's Funniest Home Videos and Judge Judy come to mind. However, they never whipped up a frenzy like their more recent reality TV cousins, because they were truly about real life and real people. The more recent incarnation of Reality TV is so successful because it places real people in wildly unreal situations. Any such transplantation of characters necessarily involves some artifice, some script. The simple truth is this: there is absolutely no way truly unscripted television can continue to draw audiences unless it is scripted in some small way. A script for reality TV may not be conceived on a scriptwriter's desk but may be constructed dynamically as the show and its characters evolve. A script, however, it still is. Much as some audiences would like to believe that reality shows, like World Wrestling Entertainment fights, are unscripted, any such belief would be far from the truth.
I was recently reading an excellent piece on Slate about how the face of reality television has changed recently. Before, you would have to be athletic or otherwise highly competitive to appear on hit reality shows like Survivor or The Apprentice. The new wave of reality television features apparently more 'real' people who are in some way pathetic enough to be on TV. People with weight problems, drug problems or financial problems that prevent them from renovating their shabby houses form being renovated are the heroes of this new wave of reality shows. Nothing -- people's personal lives, their privacy, their financial problems or their psychological problems, is sacred anymore. Almost every aspect of a TV viewer's life has a scripted reality show about it. Now how would average Joe react if all he sees on TV is other average Joes masquerading as unscripted characters about some ordinary aspect of his life? What recourse does average Joe have? The big screen.
The Ring 2. White Noise. Boogeyman. Constantine. Alone in the Dark. The Jacket. The Amityville Horror. The Grudge.
Movies removed as far away from reality as can be. What's even more surprising is that these movies are consistently rated low by moviegoers. Most of the reviews say that an underdeveloped storyline is camouflaged with creepy audio effects and spooky visuals. Yet, most of these movies appear on the list of 'most popular' movies on IMDB -- movies that received the highest number of votes. Of course, most of these votes were down-votes, left twisting in the wind like warning markers, saving other moviegoers from going down the same trail. There is a sudden onslaught of bad motion pictures dealing with the paranormal or supernatural. More importantly, as evidenced by the sheer number of these votes, people keep going to these movies only to keep rating them badly. I am convinced that this is a form of escape for average people, whose lives have been taken over by reality television.
Posted by Vishy at 11:58 AM | Comments (0)
April 16, 2005
Will I be shipped to Guantanamo?
Look! According to a biorhythm compatibility site, my emotional compatibility with Osama bin Laden is 100%. Clearly, this means I am 100% susceptible to the visceral emotions he arouses in young men with brown skin. Scary thing is, this may even qualify as grounds under some s3kr1t laws for the current administration to ship me off to the G-Spot (Guantanamo Bay).
For those who are completely unfamiliar with this New Age-y stuff, there are three cycles that govern our behavior: physical, intellectual and emotional. These cycles last for differing lengths of time, and are said to explain the highs and lows you may feel as you go through various days, much like different admixtures of primary colors explain the various colors of light visible to the human eye. The link above has more explanations. It will even give *you* a chance to find you what your biorhythm charts for today say.
Posted by Vishy at 11:21 AM | Comments (0)
April 10, 2005
Far Ahead of Its Time
It has arrived. Finally.
Ladies and gentlemen, who read my blog, I proudly present my first short story for your consumption. I dedicate it to everyone who I told I was working on this.
The term 'short story' is probably a misnomer. It is a long short story. Unfortunately, that's the only term for a piece of fiction that's too long to be called short and too short to be a novel.
It is set partly in New York and partly in the Boston area. The genre may be best described as experimental/fantasy. I hope my readers like it. Comments are welcomed, as always.
Because it is kind of long, you can download a copy of the story to read in a separate window or print out. The extended entry for this post contains the first couple of paragraphs.
Here's an excerpt:
The pink and purple neon sign garishly proclaimed "I Ching House of Electronics: Far Ahead of Its Time." Taken aback by its contrast against the inky evening sky, I looked at my watch. My eyes weren't making a mistake after all. It was natural for it to be this dark at eight o' clock on a September evening. All summer long, I had been putting off my trip to New York for one reason or another. This morning, I finally left Fenway Park and Harvard Yard behind me for my first sojourn into the city of infinite possibilities. When Kiana told me about the cheap buses that plied from Chinatown to Chinatown, one bastion of the Asian-American dream to another, where the air lay thick with the smells of a firmly rooted civilization at once experiencing the past and the future, I thought she was not being serious. She was telling me that it cost less for me to take a four hour bus ride between the Chinatowns than to cross the cities they were in with a half-hour cab ride.
My busy schedule at work was relentlessly burning me out. When I was not spending nights staring at the wallpaper in my bedroom, I slept listlessly and fitfully. Things between Julia and me hadn't been very cordial lately. I think it was because we hadn't figured out how much space to give each other in two and a half years of dating on and off. Our relationship had its flaws, but I was deeply in love with her. Perhaps Prof. Eisenstein had started noting a decline in the quality of my research, when she suggested that a break and a change of air, however brief, might do me some good. On a whim I had called Kiana that afternoon and asked her for more details about the Chinatown bus to New York. Julia said she would miss me even though I was only going to be gone for a couple of days. It was but a matter of hours before I was on the bus, hastily packed bag and travel-time light reading beside me. I was leafing lazily through Time and Newsweek, with detailed analyses of whether Bush or Clinton would win the election, when it happened. Something in Manhattan's skyline flashed into the corner of my eye in welcome. I looked up just in time to catch the sun dive into shimmering orange and pink behind the World Trade Center towers. The bus was moving at just the right speed so I could watch the dying autumn sunlight glance off a few more sentinels of the city's opulence.
Posted by Vishy at 01:00 AM | Comments (1)
April 05, 2005
Hund's Rule and Humans
Hund's Rule of Maximum Multiplicity is a simple rule that explains how atomic structure changes as atomic numbers increase. Blockquoth my chemistry textbook:
"Every orbital in a subshell is singly occupied with one electron before any one orbital is doubly occupied, and all electrons in singly occupied orbitals have the same spin"
In simple English, it says that if two electrons have two spots to fill up, then they would rather occupy one spot each rather than pair up in one spot. This reduces electron-electron repulsion, resulting in lower net energy and therefore a more stable atom. As a corollary, when two electrons do occupy nearby spots, they have opposite spins, because unidirectional spins repel each other more.
All this is well at microscopic, atomic scales. Each one of us is made up of way more atoms than there are people in the world. Wouldn't it be strange, yet somewhat unsurprising, if we too followed Hund's Rule at our macroscopic, human scales? In this post I am going to try and convince you that we do.
Scenario I:
When boarding a bus, passengers fill up all the window seats first. Only after all window seats have been paired up do incoming passengers sit next to other people. Presumably, unhappiness levels are increased if one has to *gasp* share a seat with someone when an open window seat is available. Therefore, unhappiness/disgust/contempt at sitting next to a stranger seems to be the macroscopic analogue of net energy level.
What about spin? On my trips between Boston and New York, I keep hoping for an attractive young woman to be the other electron in my orbital. If I am sitting at a window seat by myself, my seatmate usually ends up being a man, but only after he has explored all possibilities of sitting with attractive young women with free spots in their orbitals. Needless to say, in this scenario, no eye contact is made for the entire trip as we silently curse our luck for sitting with each other. If I am looking to sit in a second seat, I try to sit, in order, near a young attractive woman, a young woman and then a woman. Only after these options fail do I go sit next to a guy. My net energy level is heightened and sooner or later, this unstable arrangement is broken when the trip ends. (Sadly, even if I were sitting next to an attractive young woman in an apparently stable arrangement, we do get blown apart when the trip ends.) Without it being too much of a stretch, we can argue that if I were gay, I would be looking for an attractive young man to sit next to. Spin here is probably the analogue of gender. I try and sit next to someone who has an opposite spin (*ahem*) to me.
The exception to this, of course, is when a couple is traveling together. When they board the bus, they are generally seen to sit next to each other rather than at two separate window seats. The communication overhead, which would be higher if they sat apart, leads to greater unhappiness during the trip. The analogy of unhappiness level to energy level still stands. The exception has proven the rule.
Scenario II:
If you and one other person are in an elevator lobby, waiting for elevators, it is preferable for both of you to board two different elevators rather than get into the same elevator. This ensures a shorter average ride time for both of you. Ride time here seems to the macroscopic analogue of energy level. There doesn't seem to be a clear analogue to spin. Once again, if you are having a conversation with someone, it is more likely that you'll get into the same elevator with them so as to avoid the unhappiness caused by an interruption in the conversation.
Scenario III:
At a cafeteria or other common eating area, it is rare to find strangers sharing a table. Diners prefer to leave fellow diners alone even if they are sitting by themselves at a table that can seat four. Arguments similar to Scenario I above can be made for those who share tables, Of course, in crowded cities like New York, it is hard to follow this rule all the time. Some New Yorkers actually take this as an opportunity to meet new people, because eating alone is awful. Perhaps it is because eating food is inherently more social than traveling that this difference from Scenario I occurs.
It is really rather strange that people can be alone in massive metropolises like New York. Thinking about it in terms of Hund's Rule makes it clearer why. As is the characteristic of good rules, they find use in domains far removed from those of their original formulation. Dr. Hund, I hope you approve of my appropriation of your rule to explain urban loneliness.
Posted by Vishy at 09:15 PM | Comments (0)
Useless Factoid of the Day #4: Daylight Saving Time causes some radio stations to lose money
It's that time of the year again -- one hour of sleep has been taken away from me forever and when it does come back in October, I'm sure I'll be frittering it away on something inconsequential. Ah, c'est la vie! Daylight SavingTime, for me, is Sleep Losing Time.
This post is about how daylight saving time adversely affects small commercial radio stations. I read about it in an interview with David Prerau in the Boston Phoenix. Prerau recently published a book full of random facts, controversies and anecdotes associated with Daylight Saving Time.
I hate to be a pedantic prick about it, but it's Daylight Saving Time (like dog walking time, or vaccuming my apartment time) and not Daylight Savings Time, even though it rolls off the tongue better. See why at Wikipedia's entry about DST.
Sunlight affects the the electromagnetic and conductive properties of the ionosphere. In general, radio waves travel further during night because the ionosphere conducts them better without the powerful electromagnetic interference from sunlight. Because radio waves travel further at night, fewer stations can be broadcast without interfering with each other after the sun goes down. Certain small radio stations operate on daytime-only licenses because of these physical constraints imposed by the ionosphere.
These small radio stations typically broadcast local news, weather and traffic to their biggest audience segment, morning commuters. Generally, people don't listen to these stations in the evenings because during the evening they prefer stations with wider news and entertainment coverage. Daylight saving time comes in and shifts the hours of operation of these stations one hour later. This leaves them a smaller window in which to broadcast during the day. The end result is that they lose money when Daylight Saving Time is in effect.
This rather fascinating Useless Factoid of the Day was brought to you by the World's Largest Repository of Useless Knowledge, me.
Posted by Vishy at 12:47 AM | Comments (0)